The Problem of Atheism 9780228009375

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Translator’s Introduction
I The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem (1964)
1. On the Concept of Atheism
2. Atheism, Anti-Cleric alism, Heresy
3. Criteria for a History of Atheism
4. From the concept of atheism to the history of philosophy as a problem
5. Visions of His toryand the Idea of Revolution
6. Towards a Critique of the Ordinary Vision of the History of Philosophy
7. The Role of the Religious Philosophy of Existence in Problematizing the History of Philosophy
8. The Place of Marxismin the History of Philosophy
9. Contemporary History as Philosophical History
10. The Greatest Mistake When Interpreting Marxism, and Its Consequences
11. The Form of the Critic al Power of Marxism
12. The Nietzsche Problem
13. Order of Research
II Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism as a Political Reality (1946)
1. THE METHODOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION
2. MARX’S NON-PHILOSOPHY
3. MARXISM AND WESTERN CULTURE
III Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948)
1. THE QUALITATIVE LEAP
2. CRITIQUE OF THE CHRISTIAN-MARXIST INTERPRETATION
3. CHRISTIANITY AND MARXISM
IV Notes on Western Irreligion (1963)
1. Atheism or “Natural Irreligion” ?
2. On Contemporary Sociologism
V Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961)
1. Absolute Atheism and Practical Atheism
2. Atheistic Moments in the History of Philosophy
3. The Atheistic Option
4. Atheism and Criterion of Truth
5. Pascal’s Definition of Atheism
VI The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964)
1. LUCIEN GOLDMANN’S MARXIST “PARI”
2. THE STANDARD SECULAR VISION OF THE HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
3. INEVITABILITY OF THE CARTESIAN BEGINNING
4. THE CONCEPT OF CATHOLIC REFORMATION
5. GOLDMANN ON DESCARTES AND PASCAL
6. THE “SIGNIFICANT STRUCTURE” OF CARTESIANISM
7. THE CRISIS OF MOLINISM IN DESCARTES
8. FROM DESCARTES TO PASCAL
9. FROM PASCAL TO MALEBRANCHE
10. FROM MALEBRANCHE TO VICO
11. CONTINUITY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION
VII Political Theism and Atheism (1962)
1. The Postulate of Progress and the Postulate of Sin
2. Free Will and Political Freedom
Conclusion
Index of Names

Citation preview

T H E P RO B L E M OF AT HEI SM

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M c Gill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone   1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis

10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan

  2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press

11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn

  3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste   4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain   5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt   6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn   7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel   8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding   9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris

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12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe 16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, c. 1300–c. 1650 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni

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19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come 20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton 24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come 25 Enlightenment and Conservatism in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paola Mayer

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28 Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson 31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early EighteenthCentury Scotland Anne Skoczylas 32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman 33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski 34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard 35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard 36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1849 Martin S. Staum

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37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland 38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond, Second Edition Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz 40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard 41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle 42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan 43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762 (Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan

46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 J.A.W. Gunn 47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism Michael John DiSanto 48 Media, Memory, and the First World War David Williams 49 An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing Louis Groarke 50 Social and Political Bonds: A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence F.M. Barnard 51 Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology David Galston 52 Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Women John R. Cole

44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzenstat

53 Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond Martin S. Staum

45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald

54 Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice Rebecca Kingston

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55 Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 56 Materialist Ethics and Life-Value Jeff Noonan 57 Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles Ardis B. Collins 58 The Social History of Ideas in Quebec, 1760–1896 Yvan Lamonde Translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott 59 Ideas, Concepts, and Reality John W. Burbidge 60 The Enigma of Perception D.L.C. Maclachlan 61 Nietzsche’s Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics Peter R. Sedgwick 62 The Idea of Liberty in Canada during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 1776–1838 Michel Ducharme Translated by Peter Feldstein 63 From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 Rotem Kowner 64 The Crisis of Modernity Augusto Del Noce Edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti

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65 Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America Michael Eamon 66 The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship John von Heyking 67 War as Paradox: Clausewitz and Hegel on Fighting Doctrines and Ethics Youri Cormier 68 Network Democracy: Conservative Politics and the Violence of the Liberal Age Jared Giesbrecht 69 A Singular Case: Debating China’s Political Economy in the European Enlightenment Ashley Eva Millar 70 Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger Brian Harding 71 Before Copernicus: The Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century Edited by Rivka Feldhay and F. Jamil Ragep 72 The Culturalist Challenge to Liberal Republicanism Michael Lusztig

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73 God and Government: Martin Luther’s Political Thought Jarrett A. Carty

79 Progress, Pluralism, and Politics: Liberalism and Colonialism, Past and Present David Williams

74 The Age of Secularization Augusto Del Noce Edited and Translated by Carlo Lancellotti

80 Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace: Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche Jean-François Drolet

75 Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought Elaine Stavro 76 Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity Nicolás Fernández-Medina 77 The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism Paola Mayer 78 Objectively Engaged Journalism: An Ethic Stephen J.A. Ward

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81 Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea Eric W. Sager 82 Attending An Ethical Art Warren Heiti 83 Imperial Paradoxes: Training the Senses and Tasting the Eighteenth Century Robert James Merrett 84 The Problem of Atheism Augusto Del Noce Edited and Translated by Carlo Lancellotti

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The Problem of Atheism Augusto Del Noce Edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The problem of atheism / Augusto Del Noce; edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti. Other titles: Problema dell’ateismo. English Names: Del Noce, Augusto, 1910–1989, author. | Lancellotti, Carlo, 1965– editor, translator. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 84. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 84 | Translation of: Il problema dell’ateismo. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210295082 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210295368 | ISBN 9780228008194 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228009061 (paper) | ISBN 9780228009375 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228009382 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Atheism. | LCSH: Philosophy, Marxist. | LCSH: Communism. | LCSH: Philosophy, Modern—History. Classification: LCC BL2747.3 .D4513 2021 | DDC 211/.8—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 /13 New Baskerville.

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Contents

Translator’s Introduction  xiii I. The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem (1964)  3  1  On the Concept of Atheism 7 (Rationalism – Empiricism – Rationalist Denial of Original Sin – Classification of Atheism – Schopenhauer, Comte, Stirner, Sartre, Juvalta – An Objection)

 2 Atheism, Anti-Clericalism, Heresy 34 (Essence of Anti-Clericalism – Renouvier – Martinetti)

 3 Criteria for a History of Atheism 48  4 From the Concept of Atheism to the History of Philosophy as a Problem 50 (Axiological Meaning of Modernity – Atheism and Historicism – Three Objections)

 5 Visions of History and the Idea of Revolution 60 (The Four Essential Visions – Their Opponents – Need for a Critique)

 6 Towards a Critique of the Ordinary Vision of the History of Philosophy 63 (Idealist Vision – Brunchvicg – Philosophy through History – Marxist Visions)

 7 The Role of the Religious Philosophy of Existence in the Problematization of the History of Philosophy  70 (Religious Existentialism – Decadentism – Ontologism)

 8 The Place of Marxism in the History of Philosophy  83 (My View – Historicist Objections – Unique Philosophical Character of Marxism – Consequences)

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x

Contents

 9  Contemporary History as Philosophical History  99 10 The Greatest Mistake When Interpreting Marxism, and Its Consequences  101 (Relationship between Marx and Feuerbach – Continuations of Feuerbach)

11 The Form of the Critical Power of Marxism  114 (Annihilation of Historicism and Existentialism – Fascism – Nazism – Evolution of Communism – Contradiction and Necessary Crisis of Marxism)

12 The Nietzsche Problem  140 (Incompatibility of Marx and Nietzsche – Nietzsche and Nazism – Shestov)

13  Order of Research  157 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism as a Political Reality (1946) 169  1 The Methodological Interpretation  169  2  Marx’s Non-Philosophy  190  3  Marxism and Western Culture  201 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948)  215  1  The Qualitative Leap  215  2  Critique of the Christian-Marxist Interpretation  222  3  Christianity and Marxism  230 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963)  237  1  Atheism or “Natural Irreligion”?  237  2  On Contemporary Sociologism  260 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961)  272  1 Absolute Atheism and Practical Atheism  272   2 Atheistic Moments in the History of Philosophy  282   3 The Atheistic Option  289   4 Atheism and Criterion of Truth  299   5 Pascal’s Definition of Atheism  302

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Contents xi

VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964)  308  1 Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist “Pari”  308  2 The Standard Secular Vision of the History of Modern Philosophy  318  3 Inevitability of the Cartesian Beginning  329  4 The Concept of Catholic Reformation  334  5 Goldmann on Descartes and Pascal  335  6 The “Significant Structure” of Cartesianism  342  7 The Crisis of Molinism in Descartes  356  8 From Descartes to Pascal  368  9 From Pascal to Malebranche  383 10 From Malebranche to Vico  394 11 Continuity of the Philosophy of the Catholic Reformation  416 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962)  420   1 The Postulate of Progress and the Postulate of Sin  424   2 Free Will and Political Freedom  440 Conclusion 450

Index of Names  475

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Translator’s Introduction

In the early 1960s, publisher Il Mulino offered Augusto Del Noce the opportunity to publish a collection of his works. The result was, in 1964, his first book, Il problema dell’ateismo, which he always regarded as foundational to his whole thought and often cited (or even “cannibalized”) in his subsequent writings. In Italy it remains his best known work, still in print over fifty years later, and counted as “one of the important books of the 20th century.”1 As such, its translation into English was definitely overdue.2 However, in presenting it to English-speaking readers two warnings seem to be in order. First, unlike Del Noce’s later books, The Problem of Atheism was written before the deep cultural transformations of the mid- to late 1960s. It is rich with premonitions, and even predictions, of the new cultural landscape that was already taking shape, as one would expect from a very perceptive thinker like Del Noce. But many of its concerns come from the previous era – the great European crisis from 1917 to 1945, followed by the Cold War. Readers who appreciated Del Noce’s insights into the sexual revolution, or the student protests of 1968, or the New Left, ought to be aware that, in The Problem of Atheism, these phenomena have not yet entered his radar screen (however, the rise of the Western “affluent society” is very present to his mind).

1 Armando Torno, “Ecco dove porta il rifiuto del peccato,” Corriere della Sera, 18 June 2010, 43. 2 This volume follows my two previous Del Nocean translations, The Crisis of Modernity (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); and The Age of Secularization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).

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xiv

Translator’s Introduction

Second, it is objectively a challenging book, for more than one reason: length, complexity, the apparent heterogeneity of the material, and the rather peculiar way in which it is organized. Del Noce himself, in the very first sentence, confesses that “the apparently essayistic nature of this book … makes its structure and unity hard to grasp.”3 Based on the table of contents, a reader expects a sequence of seven essays but then is immediately shocked to discover that the “introductory” one, “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem,” is not an essay in any meaningful sense of the word, but rather a compilation of a dozen chapters dedicated to a dizzying variety of subjects and authors. Only at the end does Del Noce provide an outline of the remainder of the volume: two essays on Marxism, one on secularization in the West, one on the definition of atheism, one on seventeenth-century philosophy, and one on liberalism, followed by a conclusion. Some readers may then wonder why seventeenth-century philosophy is sandwiched between atheism and liberalism. They may also be shocked anew by the fact that the sixth essay, like the first, is disproportionately long, adding up to 112 pages of dense analysis of the history of early modern European philosophy. In truth, the “structure and unity” of The Problem of Atheism is very “hard to grasp” and has baffled many well-intentioned readers. Here I will try to elucidate it. I think that what needs to be understood is that Del Noce’s goal in assembling the book was to document an entire intellectual experience. This experience is outlined in section 13 of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem,” which should probably be read first because it is the place where Del Noce comes closest to providing a traditional introduction to the book. His objective was not to present “a philosophy that I held as absolutely certain”4 (because, as he explains, he did not have one) but to illustrate his whole trajectory of thought up to 1964. Therefore, he chose not a thematically homogeneous group of essays but, rather, a sequence of published and unpublished texts that track the development of his research. “It is a collection not of essays but of compressed books. But it was not possible for me to do otherwise because it was a matter of illustrating the necessary interdependence of a sequence of problems that are apparently unrelated, 3 Page 3. In this introduction page numbers with no other bibliographic information refer to the present volume. 4 Page 158.

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Translator’s Introduction xv

and only partially solved to this day.”5 The desire to communicate an entire experience explains not only why the essays seem heterogeneous but also why they are not ordered logically but (roughly) chronologically: “presenting the essays in the temporal order in which they had appeared seemed to me a better counsel, in order to communicate with the reader through an experience that started at the ethical-political level and led me to run into a number of philosophical problems.”6 What also needs to be explained, however, is the unusual length of the introductory essay. About that, it is instructive to read the story of the birth of the book as recounted by Nicola Matteucci, Del Noce’s friend and editor at Il Mulino, in his Introduction to the 1990 edition: We invited him to collect some of his essays for us, starting with those on Marxism and then adding a few on the seventeenth century, which dealt with political themes … We agreed to publish two volumes, one on the seventeenth century, Riforma cattolica e filosofia moderna (of which only the first tome appeared in 1965, one year after Ateismo) and one containing some essays he would select. Having finally received these essays we immediately sent them to the printer, and very soon they were typeset, proofread and paginated. We were just waiting – patiently – for a brief introduction outlining the overall meaning of the volume. The wait lasted over a year, until we finally forced him to wrap things up. He showed up, apologizing, with a manuscript which was almost as long as the book, so that (in the first edition) we were forced to use Roman numerals for the introduction … This Introduction was 212 pages, and if we consider that the six essays in the collection added up to 364 pages, we can say that this was a (new) book within a collection of (old) essays.7

So, the “apparent disorder”8 of The Problem of Atheism is due to the fact that not only did Del Noce assemble a group of heterogeneous “compressed books,” he also prefaced them with a brand new book that revisited, expanded, and corrected his whole reflection of the previous two decades. Matteucci wisely suggests that “this new book perhaps 5 Ibid. 6 Page 450. This passage is followed by another interesting recapitulation of his “experience.” 7 Il problema dell’ateismo (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1990), XV. 8 Page 450.

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xvi

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ought to be read after the essays it intends to present.”9 In fact, a fruitful reading strategy might be to extract various sections from “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem” and read them in conjunction with the older essays they revisit/expand/correct. For example, sections 8 through 11 should be read after essays II and III; sections 1 through 3 after essay V. Accordingly, the three main sections of this Introduction are devoted to three major themes that run through the book and can be used as guides to organize the material: Marxism, atheism in general, and the history of modern philosophy.10 In the fourth section I briefly comment on Del Noce’s use of the term “Ontologism.” In the last section I explain how I augmented the original table of contents to help readers orient themselves, and offer my own list of the sections I wish I had initially read (and in what order) when I first came across The Problem of Atheism.

1. On Marxism The first “compressed book” in The Problem of Atheism is clearly comprised of the two oldest essays in the collection, “Marx’s ‘Non-Philosophy’ and Communism as a Political Reality” from 1946, and “Marxism and the Qualitative Leap” from 1948. Obviously, the subject is Marxism and, more specifically, Marxism as a philosophy. This qualification is crucial because these essays aim at refuting claims that Marx was not primarily a philosopher and that his mature works as a political economist (most notably Capital) do not rely on his youthful philosophical reflection, so that they can be considered in isolation. The 1946–48 essays are supplemented by a wealth of additional material in the 1964 introduction, “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem” – in particular, section 8, The Place of Marxism in the History of Philosophy; section 10, The Greatest Mistake When Interpreting Marxism, and Its Consequences; and section 11, The Form of the Critical Power of Marxism. However, before any further discussion, it will be helpful to understand the journey that led Del Noce to his Marxist studies and why they are, in a sense, the foundation of his whole intellectual experience.  9 Il problema dell’ateismo, XV. 10 This classification is somewhat arbitrary, of course, because for Del Noce, on the one hand, Marxism is the type of modern atheism and, on the other hand, ­modern history is best described as the era in which atheism manifested itself.

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Translator’s Introduction xvii

The 1946 essay was the fruit of a process that had started roughly ten years earlier. Nineteen thirty-six had been an important year because of two events, one political and one cultural. The political event was Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, which revealed to Del Noce (then twenty-six years old) the true face of Fascism. Italy’s colonial war of aggression against a poor African country represented “the affirmation of the principle of Force as the law of history against the ideal of Justice.”11 It cleared away all possible illusions that Fascism could be a vehicle to affirm any positive ideals because, in fact it, was just the instrument for “the pure will to power of a man who did not lead towards any ideal finality, but used all values – religion and country, morality and tradition – as tools for his personal self-affirmation.”12 The cultural event was the publication in France of Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme Intégral. In a 1984 interview Del Noce remembers being “one of its very first Italian readers.”13 It was “the book by this French philosopher that struck me the most, to the point that I almost learned it by heart.”14 Whereas the Ethiopian war had convinced Del Noce of the moral necessity of anti-Fascism, Integral Humanism revealed to him the possibility of being a Catholic anti-Fascist. Until then, in Italy active opposition to Mussolini’s regime had been mostly secular, either liberal or socialist or Communist. Italian Catholics generally were not Fascist but had hoped that somehow Fascism could be a stepping stone to “something else,” which typically meant a restoration of a Catholic confessional state inspired by medieval Christendom. This hope had been given some justification by the Lateran Treaties of 1929, which had granted that “the Catholic Apostolic Roman religion is the only State religion.”15 However, during the 1930s it became clear that Fascism viewed religion purely as an instrumentum regni. In 1931, the Fascist government had shut down most Catholic newspapers and then attempted to suppress the youth wing of the Catholic Action, the largest Catholic lay organization. By 1936, faced with the rise of Nazism in

11 A. Del Noce, “L’umanesimo frainteso,” 30 Giorni no. 4 (April 1986): 70. 12 A. Del Noce, “Genesi e significato della prima sinistra cattolica italiana post­ fascista,” in Modernismo, fascismo, comunismo: Aspetti e figure della cultura e della politica dei cattolici nel ‘900, ed. G. Rossini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), 462. 13 Del Noce, Crisis of Modernity, 266. 14 Ibid. 15 Lateran Pacts, article 1.

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Germany, the Ethiopian war, and then the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, it was becoming clear to the new generation that Fascism could only be opposed. However, the traditional “medievalist” and “integralist” vision of the relationship between Christianity and politics seemed inadequate to the fight. After all, it had developed during the nineteenth century in opposition to the forms of liberalism and Socialism that had originated from the French Revolution. As such it was unequipped to criticize Fascism, which fought the exact same enemies, and claimed to defend national tradition. Maritain’s Integral Humanism broke this impasse and felt like a breath of fresh air. It was the proposal of an nonmodernist form of political Catholicism, which remained faithful to the ideals of the old civitas Christiana, but in light of them developed a radical critique of totalitarianism and made it possible to disassociate Catholicism from Fascism. Understanding the precise significance of Maritain’s proposal, and Del Noce’s reception thereof, would require a lengthy discussion. What matters here is that Catholics of Del Noce’s generation felt that Integral Humanism gave them “the right to be anti-Fascists as Catholics” and that it was precisely in this context that they faced the question of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism.16 At that time, French and Italian secular culture was rediscovering Marxist thought after several decades in which the dominant intellectual trends had been neo-Idealism (represented by thinkers like Croce and Gentile in Italy, Brunschvicg in France) and later existentialism. This renewed interest in Marx was also motivated by anti-Fascism because both neo-Idealism and existentialism had been unable to sustain an effective opposition to the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini (in fact, Gentile had even embraced Fascism and Heidegger’s attitude towards Nazism was at best ambiguous). Thus, for Del Noce and his peers, the question of a possible Catholic-Marxist alliance against Nazi-Fascism arose very naturally. In his 1981 book Il cattolico comunista he writes: “I remember perfectly when I got my first information about Marx’s philosophical thought, through Auguste Cornu’s book, in the spring of 1942, and the impression I felt, precisely as if philosophical Marxism allowed me, a Catholic, to give a precise definition to my moral reaction against Fascism … Marx seemed to me to be the thinker who had developed most deeply the critique of the bourgeois world … He

16 Del Noce, “L’umanesimo frainteso,” 70.

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had not criticized religion, but bourgeois religion … even though he had not made the distinction that to me seemed necessary; but his critique came from an implicitly religious perspective, because the bourgeois world was defined precisely by its deformation of religion.”17 As Del Noce explains, the attempt to reconcile Catholicism and Marxism was born as “a lived state of mind, as a moral reaction, in search of a doctrine.”18 This search faced an obvious stumbling block: Marx’s atheism, which already Maritain had regarded as essential to the Marxist worldview.19 Overcoming this difficulty became the chief intellectual concern of a group of young Catholic intellectuals who formed the socalled Communist-Catholic movement, which played a significant role in postwar Italian political history. Its main representatives were Felice Balbo (1913–64) and Franco Rodano (1920–83). In the early 1940s, Del Noce was a sympathizer, but by the end of the war he was already moving in a very different direction, although Balbo remained his “fraternal friend.”20 In a nutshell, the Communist-Catholic approach was to interpret Marxism as a science of history, “a science that will stand only on the experimental confirmation of its predictions and not by the power of a philosophical foundation of which it has no need.”21 This interpretation implied “the non-recognition of the philosophical character of Marxism. In their view it was a science (historical materialism that discovered the ‘general laws’ of history; Marx as the ‘Galileo’ of the science of history, and so on), on which an ideology had been superimposed.”22 This ideology, however, was “provisional” and could be cast off through a process that Felice Balbo described as a “qualitative leap.” Through the qualitative leap Marxism would “by necessity abandon its atheistic aspect and recognize its own character as science.”23 Then a purified Catholicism (freed from the aspect whereby it is an 17 Augusto Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista (Milan: Rusconi: 1971), 50–1. The book by Cornu cited by Del Noce is Karl Marx, de l’hégégelianisme au matérialisme historique (Paris: Alcan, 1934). 18 Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista, 49. 19 As I mention later, in his mature works Del Noce criticized Maritain’s explanation of the genesis of Marxist atheism but gave him credit for recognizing (unlike some of his followers) that it is an essential part of Marx’s thought. 20 Page 34n46. 21 Page 169. 22 Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista, 180, emphasis in the original. 23 Ibid., 200, emphasis in the original.

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ideological cover for the bourgeois social order) would become the natural metaphysical complement of Marxist science, “because Marxism and Catholicism are both true; the former is correct about the interpretation of contemporary history or history in general … the latter is correct at the metaphysical-religious level.”24 The background of Del Noce’s two essays on Marxism from 1946 to 1948 is precisely his break with the Communist-Catholic experience, due to the discovery that, in Marxism, the philosophical aspect has both theoretical and practical priority over the “science of history” aspect. This context is clearly visible in the structure of the essays: both start with sections that discuss approaches that deny the significance of Marxism as a philosophy. In the 1946 essay, Del Noce refers to what he calls the “methodological interpretation” of Marxism, which he traces back to Sidney Hook’s 1933 book Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx.25 In the 1948 essay, he specifically addresses Felice Balbo’s article from that same year, “Religione e ideologia religiosa.”26 Today, these initial sections will be of interest to historians of ideas more than to a general readership. On the other hand, the remainders of the two essays – and especially the second sections, in which Del Noce presents his own interpretation of Marxism – remain pièces de résistance of the whole Del Nocean corpus. Del Noce himself held them to be some of his best work and the cornerstone of his whole political thought because they transcend the question that motivated them (the Catholic-Marxist relationship) and arrive at a comprehensive evaluation of the significance of Marx’s philosophy in the history of European thought.27 In broad outline, for Del Noce Marx’s philosophy, far from being a repudiation of Hegel, is the culmination of Hegelian rationalism, where “the rationalist attitude is nothing but the simple assumption that man’s present condition is its normal condition.”28 Already in Hegel rationalism means the radical rejection of every form of transcendence, but the “reconciliation of the rational and the real” still takes place at the level

24 Ibid., 32, emphasis in the original. 25 London: Gollancz, 1933. 26 In Rivista di Filosofia no. 2 (1948): 105–31. 27 In “A self-introduction,” in Quaderni della Fondazione Centro Studi Augusto Del Noce 2005–2006 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006). Del Noce refers to “Marx’s ‘NonPhilosophy’” as the essay “I most care about.” 28 Page 234.

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of comprehension. In Marx’s view, philosophy as comprehension still contains a form of transcendence, that of the universal to which the philosopher (the “professor”) elevates himself “by forgetting himself.” This inevitably introduces a break between thought and life, and leads to the “conservative” outcome of Hegelianism. Therefore, “the Marxist attempt at reaffirming the unity of rational and real cannot take any other route but that of a radical atheologization of reason. Consequently, man is no longer measured by reason, by the presence of the universal, of the value, of the idea of God etc., … but man is the measure of reason.”29 Marxist thought marks a radical break with the Greek and Christian affirmation that man participates in a universal rationality (the Platonic Logos). On the contrary, according to Marx, “thought is praxis … activity that transforms reality,” and “philosophy will no longer express itself in the form of a book or a system (comprehension, self-consciousness, etc. of a realized totality) but in the realization of a totality.”30 In short, “all of Marxism [constitutes itself] in the transition from a concept of philosophy as comprehension to a concept of philosophy as revolution,”31 but this shift reflects a deep anthropological shift. “If man thinks not as a participant in reason, or at any rate in a universal essence, but as man belonging to a given historical situation, the figure of the ‘social man’ in the specifically Marxist sense of this term arises.”32 Whereas “in Platonic-Christian thought man is in a necessary relationship with God, and in a contingent relationship with society,” in Marxism “the relationship with society becomes necessary and constitutive.”33 What makes Marxism so historically significant, and the prototype of so much modern political thought, is the fact of being “the first consistent non-Christian anthropology.”34 This new anthropology accounts for the very special nature of Marx’s atheism, which “means the disappearance of the problem of God (so that one could also say that, rigorously speaking, for him the very figure of atheism disappears).”35 Rather than denying God, Marx denies the religion question by denying classical

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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philosophical rationality (the preambula fidei) altogether. Philosophy is replaced by politics, but this replacement is itself philosophical, not merely practical. When Del Noce assembled The Problem of Atheism in 1964, the two essays on Marxism were by far the oldest in the book, and so in the introduction he extensively revisited some of his conclusions (sections 8 through 11). In the intervening years, in the context of the Cold War, Western critics of Marxism had tended to condemn it either as faulty social science or as a pseudo-religious ideological phenomenon, thus calling again into question, like the old revisionists, its philosophical nature. Del Noce actually agrees that Marxism is an “atheistic religion,” but in section 8 he insists that such religion is a result of Marx’s philosophy of history, of his affirmation that there is a direction of history moving towards the liberation of mankind. The revolutionary is able to read this direction of history by interpreting the thoughts and expectations of the masses, and thereby he is able to turn philosophy into religion. Marxism is “modern philosophy in the aspect in which it presents itself as secular (that is, as surpassing transcendent thought), which becomes a religion,” although paradoxically, “since it is purely rational, [it] can make itself a religion only in the form of rigorous atheism.”36 It is important to understand that in Del Noce’s view Marx’s becoming world of philosophy is not the practical application to the world of a philosophical theory about the world. Marxism is “a philosophy ante factum and not a philosophy post factum.”37 It does not try to first comprehend the world in order to change it. Rather, it identifies philosophy with political action to bring about a new reality that cannot be described using the categories of the old reality. Revolutionary thought is “religious” because the “new man” has not yet been revealed and will only be revealed by the revolution. Thus, it must “establish as the ultimate criterion of truth a historical outcome – namely, the revolution not as an idea but as a real event.”38 This “replacement of speculative philosophy with the philosophy of praxis” forces Marxism “to abandon the perspective of truth and to identify what is true with what is practically effective, with what is capable

36 Pages 91 and 93. 37 Page 92. 38 Page 99.

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of intensifying life.”39 In practice, it can only articulate its project in terms of ideological myths. This reaffirmation of the philosophical significance of Marxism as the “negation-realization of philosophy” that “makes itself a religion” leads Del Noce in section 9 to one of the core claims of The Problem of Atheism: that “contemporary history is philosophical history.”40 If the major political movements of the twentieth century (Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and the “affluent society”) can be traced back to the Leninist revolution (either as continuations or as responses that fail to call into question its philosophical presuppositions), and if Lenin was the one who truly understood Marx’s idea that philosophy coincides with revolutionary action, then contemporary history is the unfolding of that idea: If Marx’s thought is genuinely philosophical, we must take literally his sentence stating that his conception is that of a philosophy that becomes world (which surpasses itself into political realization and finds its verification therein) as opposed to that of a world that becomes philosophy; if, furthermore, contemporary history is the history of the expansion of Marxism, it takes a new character … It is not just history that can be comprehended by the philosopher; it is history made by the philosopher, because for Marx the value of thought is that of establishing the conditions for effective action aimed at transforming society and the world. Therefore contemporary history is philosophical history … To those who will reproach me for linking too tightly political discourse and philosophical discourse, I simply have to respond that this follows from having taken seriously Marx’s philosophical thought.41

In section 10, Del Noce discusses the most common misunderstanding of Marxism, namely, attributing to Marx Feuerbach’s type of atheism. Feuerbach’s atheism is humanistic and extends the Enlightenment’s critique of religion, whereas Marx’s atheism coincides with the revolutionary religion and extends Hegel’s philosophy of history. This crucial difference is illustrated by the numerous philosophical-political positions that continue (aware or unaware) Feuerbach, which Del Noce reviews in the remainder of section 10. He starts section 11 arguing that all of 39 Page 101. 40 Page 100. 41 Page 99–100.

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them have to be “annihilated” by Marxism and that a correct interpretation of Marxism also sheds light on the three major anti-Communist political movements of the twentieth century – he discusses Fascism and Nazism,42 while he refers the reader to essay IV for the ideology of the affluent society. In the second part of the section, he considers the evolution of Communism itself (as manifested in Russian history) and presents his own critique of Marxism, which leads him to diagnose its simultaneous victory and defeat in some of the most famous and prescient passages of The Problem of Atheism. Del Noce’s claim is that “there is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction, of which the historical process is the manifestation.”43 Marx’s philosophy combines two aspects that are both necessary to support his revolutionary aspirations but that are actually incompatible: In Marx there is an aspect that clearly derives from Hegel … which leads to the primacy of praxis, to man as the creator of his own history, to the new task of the philosopher, no longer to interpret the world but to change it. And there is the objectivization of this position within the deterministic vision of the philosophy of history typical of the nineteenth century. Hence the materialistic affirmation of the primacy of economic life, the thesis that Communism is the result of the inevitable history of production, the thesis of the determining power of the infrastructure (i.e., the forms of production that correspond to social relationships), of which the superstructure, ideologies, are the reflection … [I]t was inevitable that during the further development of Socialist thought the two positions would break apart, and that both of them would give up on the original hope in the outcome of the revolution.44

The first, dialectic and revolutionary, aspect was developed by Lenin, who made the party the revolutionary agent instead of the proletariat. He pushed “to the ultimate consequences the idea that the Communist

42 Del Noce views Italian Fascism as a form of purely dialectic, non-materialistic revolutionary thought, even more so than Leninism, which preserves historical materialism as a doctrine even as it affirms the supremacy of revolutionary practice. For Del Noce’s interpretation of Fascism, see also the essay “Notes towards a Historical Definition of Fascism,” in Age of Secularization, 96–117. 43 Page 129. 44 Page 135.

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Party (which for him is a philosophical reality) is the point of arrival of classical German philosophy … This line of development did, indeed, bring about a revolution which, however, came to fruition in a diametrically opposite form to that predicted by its prophet.”45 Del Noce reconstructs the process whereby Leninism transformed “from faith in a revolution that will realize a world of equals into an instrument of power for a nation and a class.” In order to hold on to power it had to establish “a dictatorship of the party (i.e., of the minority made up of professional revolutionaries) over the proletariat.” Then, based on the party “a new techno-bureaucratic class formed” that was no less hegemonic than the bourgeoisie. The only change was the replacement of Marx’s “alienation in the beyond … by alienation in the future” and “the complete reduction of philosophy to ideology.”46 The second aspect was “Marx according to whom ideologies can be explained based on economic reality and social relations.” Ultimately, this side was bound to undermine the revolutionary impulse itself because “this idea of his cannot but apply to Marxism as well. There is, therefore, the objectivization of Marxism into sociology. Next to revolutionary Marxism there is … its continuation into absolute relativism … that is, into the most complete negation of the revolutionary spirit … So, the historical result of Marxism is, on the one side, Communist reality, in the way it has become realized, and on the other the affluent society, in a non-dialectic form of opposition.”47 The affluent society rejects Communism not on moral or religious grounds but as a failed social experiment. Its intellectuals apply to Marxism itself Marx’s materialistic-sociological critique, and such “objectivized” Marxism (in which the social sciences replace philosophy and religion) shapes the secular worldview that Del Noce describes in essay IV, “Notes on Western Irreligion.” We have here the first appearance, as far as I know, of one of Del Noce’s most famous ideas: that twentieth-century political history was marked by the decomposition of Marxism. The Leninist revolution and its opponents developed the two incompatible sides of Marx’s thought, leading in the East to Stalin’s neo-Czarism and the rule of the technobureaucratic class, in the West to the radically bourgeois culture of the 45 Page 135. 46 Pages 125, 137–8. 47 Pages 138–9.

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affluent society. Both outcomes are atheistic but contradict Marx’s expectation of a revolutionary catharsis. Far from ending alienation, they make it more extreme, reaching what in later works Del Noce will call a heterogenesis of ends. “Marxism has already completely won, but negating itself most totally … it concludes in an insuperable contradiction … [B]ecause of this victory, there is the tragic situation of Christianity today, such as it never happened before: it is in a vise between two opposite types of society, which share a common origin, neither one of which is Christianizable.”48

2 . O n m o d e r n at h e i s m A second, fairly well-defined group of essays in The Problem of Atheism concerns the definition, history, and characteristics of modern atheism in general. The main text is “Reflections on the Atheistic Option,” which dates back to 1961. It “continues” in section 1 of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem,”49 in which Del Noce expands several points of the 1961 essay and answers various possible objections. The other major essay in this group is “Notes on Western Irreligion,” which is a very significant text not only because of its content but also because of its location in the book. If Del Noce had followed literally the criterion of ordering the essays in The Problem of Atheism chronologically, the next in line after his 1946–48 essays on Marxism should have been “Reflections on the Atheistic Option” – which is in a sense their logical continuation because it clearly takes Marxism to be the “type” of modern atheism. Instead, Del Noce chose to break the chronological order and insert before it “Notes on Western Irreligion,” an unpublished essay written just the year before (1963). The reason for this decision can be glimpsed in the very first paragraph: “If we turn our attention to the Western world, we may be led to doubt that the statement that atheism is the primary datum of the

48 Page 139–40. 49 Sections 2 and 3 also build on “Reflections on the Atheistic Option,” but they are rather specialized. Section 2 is a study of the nature of anti-clericalism, which in typical Del Nocean fashion veers into a sympathetic discussion of the thought of two “minor” philosophers – Piero Martinetti and Charles Renouvier. Section 3 is just a brief discussion of what criteria should guide a comprehensive study of the history of atheism.

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historical circumstance truly expresses the factual situation. Because we may wonder whether the ‘pressing reality’ of the last twenty years … has been the spreading of something entirely different from atheism – namely, ‘natural irreligion’ (the loss, the eclipse of the sacred, or whatever else we want to call it).”50 Something new had happened since 1945: a new culture had gradually become prevalent in Europe and North America in the context of the Cold War. This new “West” was not Marxist, and in fact stood in opposition to the worldwide expansion of Communism, but was just as clearly irreligious. Its dominant philosophy was not rationalism but empiricism, and its attitude towards religion was not atheism but agnosticism – the agnosticism of scientists, economists, and technocrats who consider religious questions irrelevant to the problems of the “real world.” This attitude, which became a “mass phenomenon,” represents “a higher level of impiousness than atheism in as much as it rejects the very idea of religion.”51 Ever attentive to “factual reality,” Del Noce realized the novelty of this “natural irreligion” and felt that it challenged his previous views of atheism. He states this challenge explicitly in the final pages of section 1 of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.” Does contemporary Western irreligion still have the dignity of a philosophy? Or is it just “a complete rejection of philosophy,”52 which explains away religious questions in the name of “science” (especially psychoanalysis)? And then, does it still make sense to speak of Marxism as the prototype and source of modern atheism? Clearly he felt that he could not republish “Reflections on the Atheistic Option” (which was only two years old!) without first confirming that its opening claim – “atheism as an invasive reality is the most characteristic phenomenon of our epoch, unprecedented in history”53 – was still justified. This is the task that Del Noce assigns to himself in “Notes on Western Irreligion,” a pioneering work that prefigures his later works on secularization, as found, for example, in his 1971 collection The Age of Secularization. In fact, it is probably one of the very first works of cultural criticism, not only in Italy, on the transformation of Western culture 50 51 52 53

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from 1945 to the early 1960s. Its main thesis is that although atheism (in the “traditional” sense) and the new “natural irreligion” are “essentially different phenomena,” nonetheless “at the bottom of the features displayed today by the Western world there is an ideal and properly ­philosophical causality, of which contemporary natural irreligion is just a consequence.”54 Thus, Western irreligion, too, is an effect, or a new manifestation, of “philosophical atheism.” In order to make his case, Del Noce conducts a lengthy refutation of “the commonly accepted thesis that there is a direct relationship between progress of technology and increase of irreligion.”55 In his view, the “absolutization of technicism” that underpins natural irreligion is not a mere side effect of technological progress but, rather, reflects a philosophy associated with a new type of society, which he calls the “affluent society,” borrowing the title of a well-known book by John Kenneth Galbraith.56 As I already mentioned, Del Noce sees a “kinship in opposition” between the ideology of the affluent society and Marxism. [The affluent society] succeeds in eliminating the dialectic tension that sustains the revolution by pushing alienation to the highest degree … Each subject perceives the other as alienus, extraneous, separated  – that is, not joined to me by devotion to a shared (not necessarily religious) value – and therefore as an ob-jectum, regardless of whether I deem this “thing placed in front of me” to be a useful instrument or an obstacle. Strictly speaking, society is no longer such because multiplicity is not unified: we have a society without meaning and without value because the normative idea and the utopian perspective of the city of God has disappeared … We can add: the affluent society gauges both the power and the impotence of Marxism. The power, because in it Marxism forces its adversary, the society opposed to it, to manifest itself in its pure state, as a bourgeois society that by now is unencumbered by all ties with a Christian society, a liberal society, a seigneurial society … I think we can say that, by rejecting the types of society that I mentioned, the affluent society marks the acceptance of all the Marxist criticisms while, at the same time, radically negating the Marxist religion. So, we can

54 Pages 238 and 243–4. 55 Page 244. 56 J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).

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also say that it is an empiricist and individualistic translation of Marxism. But, on the other hand, Marxism seems impotent to overthrow it.57

Del Noce’s thesis is that, far from being a mere effect of technical progress and economic well-being, “the present irreligion of the Western world reflects the fact that, having constituted itself in opposition to Marxism, this world is subordinate to it, due to a failure to really surpass it.”58 In the second part of the essay, he finds new evidence to support this thesis by studying the rise of what he calls “sociologism,” namely, the “integral relativism” of modern Western culture, which regards sociology as a “new universal science of human realities” in place of philosophy. Sociologism pushes “the Marxist theory of ideologies … to the extreme, until it means that all perspectives of thought, including the Marxist, do not express something eternal but are always tied to certain social situations.” Del Noce shows that, historically, the expansion of sociologism can also be traced back to the Marxist “annihilation of philosophy,” and therefore cannot be understood apart from a historical context in which atheism is the “primary question.” This conclusion sets the stage for “Reflections on the Atheistic Option.” It was written in part as a response to Maritain’s La signification de l’athéisme contemporain,59 which, essentially, had placed the responsibility for the rise of Marxist atheism on the hypocrisy (on the “practical atheism”) of bourgeois Christianity. Unsurprisingly, to Del Noce Maritain’s “point of view seems inadequate” since it is tantamount to denying the philosophical depth and significance of Marx’s atheism.60 In fact, later in The Problem of Atheism, Del Noce argues that Maritain’s failure to understand Marx was the fatal weakness that undermined his whole effort at understanding the contemporary cultural/political landscape.61 In “Reflections on the Atheistic Option” he just points out that Maritain’s diagnosis (atheism as “a response to the practical atheism of a certain Christian world”) applies, if anything, to the atheism

57 Page 256. 58 Page 260. 59 Jacques Maritain, La signification de l’athéisme contemporain (Paris: Desclée, 1949) [“The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism,” in The Range of Reason (New York: Scribner’s, 1952)]. 60 Page 273. 61 Pages 436–7.

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of Proudhon, which, however, should be more properly described as “anti-clericalism.”62 In Del Noce’s view what characterizes the dominant form of twentiethcentury atheism (which descends from Marx, not from Proudhon) is being “postulatory,” or “positive.” This means that the non-existence of God is postulated on moral grounds – for the sake of human liberation and “to make possible truly rigorous morality, science and politics.”63 Whereas the dominant form of atheism of the nineteenth century was scientistic – in the sense that it at least accepted the question of God as important, even if it answered it in the negative – contemporary atheism tends to see the whole religious dimension as irrelevant to human fulfilment. It replaces the explicit negation of the existence of God with the positive affirmation of the technical-political self-redemption of mankind: “the attempt to prove the non-existence of God is replaced by the attempt to show that atheism alone makes possible the full realization of scientific, moral, and political humanism; in this sense we should speak of a rejection not primarily of God but of the theistic disposition – that is, of the reasons that led people to pose the question of God – whereas old atheism was still merely an answer to this question.”64 Even though atheism became fully aware of its “optional nature” only in the last century, such awareness was the end of a process that started at the beginning of the modern age. Del Noce argues that there was no ancient or medieval atheism in a proper sense. In his view, atheism “is in a proper sense a position subsequent to Christianity, because it comes after the ideas of Revelation and Supernatural, and constitutes their criticism.”65 More specifically, in European history “the phenomenon of atheism comes about at the terminal moment of each of the three fundamental modern directions that call for going beyond religion into philosophy, and thus for the negation of the supernatural,” namely, at the end “of the Renaissance … of the Enlightenment [and] of classical German philosophy.”66 Del Noce defines the attitude of negating the supernatural as rationalism.

62 Pages 273–8. As I already mentioned, Del Noce’s discussion of anti-clericalism as a philosophical phenomenon is found in pages 34–48 in this volume. 63 Page 281. 64 Page 279. 65 Pages 17–8. 66 Page 283.

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Rationalism does not necessarily deny God (it can be deistic, for example), but it denies that there is anything intrinsically lacking or problematic about the human condition, as expressed by the Christian doctrine of the Fall. However, there is a pattern whereby atheism makes its “necessary appearance … at the terminal moment of rationalistic positions.”67 Atheism presents itself as the terminal stage of a process of thought that is initially conditioned by a negation without proof of the possibility of the supernatural … If we call this initial negation of possibility “rationalism,” we can say that atheism has the function of highlighting its original option, the ­denial without proofs of the status naturae lapsae. The option that defines atheism is not primarily and essentially a response to practical atheism … [T]he rationalist attitude is just the simple elevation, as a consequence of the initial rejection of the Fall, of man’s current condition to the status of his normal condition … But such elevation of man’s fallen reality to the status of normal reality cannot but coincide with the elevation to normality of death as the destiny of the finite being and, thus, with the affirmation of the negativity of the finite.68

In political terms, the negation of the Fall is tied to the idea of revolution. Revolution “means the liberation of man, via politics, from the ‘alienation’ imposed on him by the social orders that have been realized so far, and rooted only in the structure of these orders. Therefore, it implies the replacement of religion by politics for the sake of man’s liberation since evil is a consequence of society, which has become the subject of culpability, and not of an original sin. As varied as the forms of revolution, understood in this sense, can be, their common feature is the correlation between the elevation of politics to religion and the negation of the supernatural.”69 Not by chance the revolutionary idea first appears in Rousseau – whose religious position is a sort of Pelagianism, which “affirms God, freedom, and immortality but denies sin and grace”70 – and then finds in Marx its “definitive expression.”71 67 68 69 70 71

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The fact that it is the full manifestation of “the essence of rationalism [as] a gratuitous option in favour of man’s aseity and self-sufficiency,”72 which “by necessity must be without proof,” explains why positive atheism naturally eschews any theoretical corroboration. Instead, it always seeks its verification at the historical and practical-political level, trying to present itself as the inevitable result of the process of history. “In the final analysis, for an atheist the criterion of truth lies in the recognition that transcendent thought has been surpassed by history; in the sense that one cannot account for the historical process of thought if not by conceiving of it as a development towards more and more rigorous immanence, and in the sense that transcendent thought is impotent to generate efficient political and social forms (i.e., forms not liable to become tools for forces of an entirely different nature).”73 Therefore, any critique of contemporary atheism (including, as we have seen, the atheism of the affluent society) must call into question its historical narrative, and in particular its narrative about the history of philosophy. This brings us to Del Noce’s third major area of concern in The Problem of Atheism.

3. On the history of philosophy Del Noce brings up his fundamental claim about the theoretical significance of the history of philosophy on the very first page of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.” I beg the kind reader to keep in mind the essential thesis, which is the motivation for the book, because I have never seen it clearly expressed elsewhere: the problematization of the phenomenon of atheism, as the primary datum of the historical circumstance … requires, as the “theoretically” primary question, the problematization of the standard view of the history of philosophy. … Posing this question seems to me the unifying locus of theoretical philo­ sophy, moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, political philosophy, or even, as we shall see later, of contemporary politics itself. It is the meeting point, in our time, of philosophy and life.74

72 Page 299. 73 Page 301. 74 Pages 3–4.

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Simply put, if positive atheism is embodied in Marxism, and if Marxism claims to be the inevitable culmination of modern European philosophy, its critique must involve a critique of the “standard view” of the history of that philosophy, from Descartes to Hegel, and especially of its formative period, the seventeenth century. Del Noce expands and clarifies this question in sections 4 through 6 of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.” He then presents his critique of the “standard view” in the longest essay in The Problem of Atheism, “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism,” which is precisely what in the introductory essay Del Noce describes as a “compressed book.” It is in fact a “compressed trilogy,” in which Del Noce “contracted in 134 pages a work of more than one thousand pages, of which over six hundred have already been published in various works that I cite here, and which is the content of three volumes to be published in the near future. Such contraction, which was inevitable, certainly could not lead to a model of clarity.”75 The three volumes in question were supposed to be collectively titled Catholic Reformation and Modern Philosophy, but only the first, on Descartes,76 actually appeared in 1965, one year after The Problem of Atheism. The fact that the complete trilogy never appeared actually makes “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism” more interesting because it is, to my knowledge, Del Noce’s only presentation in a single text of his general interpretation of modern French and Italian philosophy, the fruit of decades of study and reflection. However, the compression of such a large amount of material has the effect of making the essay arguably both too long (it is still essentially a book) and too short (many profound insights are just sketched, making the presentation highly condensed). If we add the fact that Del Noce is also keen on showing the relevance of his results to contemporary atheism, we see why it cannot be a “model of clarity.” In fact, its very title lends itself to be misunderstood, as if the essay were primarily about Pascal. In reality, Pascal is only one author in the development of “Cartesianism” studied by Del Noce (Descartes-PascalMalebranche-Vico, with Geulincx as a supporting actor). Moreover, as I mentioned, for Del Noce the entire history of seventeenth-century 75 Page 166. 76 Augusto Del Noce, Riforma cattolica e filosofia moderna, vol. 1, Cartesio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1965); new edition (Brescia: Scholè, 2019).

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thought is relevant to the study of atheism because this latter claims to be the result of an inexorable process that started with Descartes. The reason for the title is actually that the essay was occasioned by Del Noce’s intellectual encounter with the distinguished French Marxist thinker Lucien Goldmann (1913–70). Del Noce drew from his book Le Dieu Caché the idea that Pascal’s thought “interfaces” in a particular way with the question of contemporary atheism (hence the title).77 The most accurate description of “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism” is that it is not just a highly condensed exposition of Del Noce’s vision of seventeenth-century thought; rather, it is such an exposition in answer to Goldmann’s vision of the history of European philosophy, and in view of its implications about contemporary atheism, and Marxism in particular. Del Noce reviews this vision at some length. Goldmann starts “from an interpretation of Marx that at bottom is identical to the one I had proposed in the second essay of this collection, without thinking directly of Pascal at that time.”78 Namely, Marxism is not “an objective sociology … What Marxism is about is, instead, a total attitude that spans in an organic unity the comprehension of social reality, the value that judges it and the action that transforms it … The only suitable word to describe it is ‘faith’ … faith in a historical future that we must create through our action.”79 Thus, “having discarded the conception that believes in historical necessity … Goldmann’s Marxism takes on an appearance that is curiously similar to that of Pascal’s thought” and adopts the idea of the pari. However, just as Pascal must “fortify” his wager by appealing to Sacred History, so a Marxist must rely on the history of philosophy: “the only criterion it can use to manifest its (relative, because historical) truth is that of being able to situate, surpassing them and integrating them, other worldviews.”80 77 Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu Caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) [The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London: Verso, 2016)]. In his foreword to the English edition, Michael Löwy laments that Goldmann’s “provocative assertion of an ‘elective affinity’ between Marxist belief and (Christian) tragic faith … did not find a great echo in Christian thought in France.” Ironically it did find such an echo in Del Noce in Italy, but probably Goldmann never heard about it. To the best of my knowledge the two had no personal contact. 78 Page 308. 79 Pages 309–10. Del Noce is paraphrasing a passage from Le Dieu Caché. 80 Page 312–13.

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Specifically, Goldmann views Marxism as the culmination of a threestage process in modern thought. The first stage is rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, and their successors), which is individualistic and thus “essentially a-moral and a-religious.” The reaction against rationalism takes the form of a “tragic vision” (Pascal, and later Kant). “This vision … is first of all the affirmation of a set of values that transcends the individual; and yet, it does not express itself as a form capable of replacing the atomistic and mechanic world of individualistic rationalism … because its temporal dimension is the present and not the future.”81 The third stage is precisely “dialectic thought,” which replaces Pascal’s wager on God with Marx’s wager on the future. To Goldmann’s “general interpretation of the historical process of modern philosophy” Del Noce opposes his own. Here I can only outline the main points. •

•

According to the standard secular view, what defines “modern” ­philosophy is a sharp break with ancient and medieval thought, which takes place when “reason becomes the supreme tribunal against which all others must be measured.” “Modern philosophy presents itself as absolute rationalism in the sense of a radical refusal of the supernatural, but as rationalism that has appropriated the Christian truth of the real distinction between man and nature.” This vision of the history of philosophy “as a process towards the ­radical denial of transcendence in a religious sense” plays a major theoretical role as “the fundamental argument that every kind of ­secularism can bring up in its favour.” So far it has never been ­problematized because even opponents of secularism have ­essentially accepted it.82 This “equation of modernity and secularity” forces any secularist reconstruction of the history of modern philosophy to include certain obligatory steps. First of all, the philosophy of Descartes must be viewed as the beginning of a new period. Second, all attempts at post-Cartesian philosophies compatible with religious transcendence must be viewed as dead ends. Allegedly, Pascal was an isolated ­anti-Cartesian, Malebranche pursued an impossible reconciliation between Cartesianism and scholasticism, Vico was an unaware precursor of secular historicism. In this sense, “the question whether

81 Page 315. 82 Section 2.

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•

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modern philosophy is secular or not can be answered by studying the ­philosophy of the 1600s.” Del Noce agrees that Descartes marked a unique and irreplaceable new beginning in the history of European thought, to which one can trace back most modern philosophies. But he disagrees that the “philosophers of the Catholic Reformation,” whose “primary intuition [is] the correlation between the Protestant negation of man, of his freedom and of his merits, and the ­degradation of God to mere irrational power,” failed to critically ­address the new situation.83 Del Noce thinks that, despite their huge differences, there is actually a deeper continuity from Descartes to Pascal to Malebranche to Vico, which shows that the history of modern philosophy contains another line of development, which does not progress towards secularization but towards a reaffirmation of classical metaphysics. Proving this ­continuity requires a refutation of the traditional interpretation by secular historians that sees an absolute opposition between Pascal and Descartes. Del Noce presents Goldmann’s form of the secular ­interpretation, which draws a sharp contrast between the “rationalist” Descartes and the “tragic thinker” Pascal.84 To make his case Del Noce argues that there is a general framework or “significant structure” (in Goldmann’s language) that unites those four thinkers and defines “Cartesianism.” This significant structure is determined by two essential features of the thought of Descartes: being a philosophy of freedom and being ahistorical. Following French scholar Jean Laporte, Del Noce interprets Cartesian methodical doubt as the experience that the human subject transcends the world and, therefore, is free. In this respect, the primary adversary of Cartesian philosophy is the thought of the libertines, whose ­dogmatic materialism led them to skepticism and the denial of ­freedom. At the same time, however, Descartes made a “concession in opposition” to their Machiavellianism by accepting that philosophy must be radically separated from history because history is the ­domain of the ragion di stato. Thus, “the suitable formula to describe the significant structure of Cartesianism is that of separate interiority or of dissociation of the spiritual life from politics and from history … It is now a matter of looking within this structure at the very peculiar ­relationship, of opposition and unity, that exists between Descartes and Pascal.”85 83 Sections 3 and 4. 84 Section 5. 85 Section 6.

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•

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To this end, Del Noce examines the philosophy of Descartes from the religious standpoint and concludes that it is essentially ambiguous. It is “religious according to his theses objectively considered,” but it “generates a spiritual disposition that hampers the transition from natural truths to revealed truths.” On the one hand, the theme of human freedom gives it an Augustinian character, as a philosophy of interiority, which in principle is open to revelation. But on the other hand, what ends up prevailing is “the power of negativity whereby I can break my dependence on history and become capable of an absolutely new beginning,” which is joined with “the idea of man’s dominion over nature.” In this second respect, the philosophy of Descartes is a “new Pelagianism” that exalts human freedom and prepares the road for the Enlightenment. Del Noce traces this ambiguity back to a conflict between Descartes’s novelty (his theory of freedom, the Augustinian aspect) and “a presupposed Molinist spiritual disposition” whereby he took for granted the “autonomy of human values.”86 Del Noce is now ready to state his thesis about the nature of the “continuity” between Descartes and Pascal: “Pascal’s thought ­represents not anti-Cartesianism sic et simpliciter but the continuation of Descartes’s thought totally separated from the presupposed Molinism in which the novelty of Descartes was inserted.” This because Pascal’s critique of metaphysics (of the proofs of the existence of God, of Deism, and so on) is actually an extension (probably unaware) of Descartes’s theory of divine freedom and infinity, which in Del Noce’s opinion is “as important for Descartes as that of human ­freedom.” Thus, Pascal pits the novel aspect of Cartesian philosophy (which amounts to the affirmation of the “mysteriosity of God’s ­nature”) against its Molinist presuppositions (which push it towards secularity).87 However, Pascal’s anti-Molinist critique led him to a radical anti-­ humanism, which left it unprepared to face the new positive atheism that would come out of the Enlightenment. In him, “the dissociation of spirituality and history … leads to a break between humanism and anti-humanism.” The (unsuccessful) attempt to heal this break is

86 Section 7. Notice that Del Noce differs from those who tie Descartes’s “secularity” to the subjectivism of the cogito. He thinks that Descartes’s affirmation of freedom against libertine naturalism was actually his religious aspect, while the Molinist mindset he had absorbed from his Jesuit education was responsible for his “secular” aspect. 87 Section 8.

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what marks, in Del Noce’s view, the thought of Malebranche and ­defines “the history of modern Christian Ontologism” from Malebranche to Rosmini. Malebranche “starts exactly where Pascal ends,” namely, “the religious renunciation of the world,” and ­rediscovers within the experience of faith “the need to become conscious of the rationality of the obsequium.” This turned out to be impossible, however, within the “significant structure” of Cartesianism.88 Malebranche’s contradictions highlight the importance of Vico’s thought, which can be “interpreted as the continuation of Descartes’s critique of atheism after having criticized the concession (in opposition) to the libertines, which is the distinctive feature of Cartesian ahistoricity … A continuation that is also the continuation of Malebranche’s Occasionalism and Ontologism.” Del Noce collects a sequences of Vichian texts, especially from De Uno, that show that “we can easily reconstruct his thought as an extension to history of Malebranche’s philosophy, against adversaries that this latter had not taken on: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bayle.” However, in the course of this extension Vico arrives at a radical critique of the “monastic” and “geometric” character whereby Cartesianism abandons the field of history to the rationalism of the libertines and thus opens the way to the Enlightenment. The most striking feature of Del Noce’s ­interpretation of Vico is the rejection of his supposed “immanentism” (as affirmed, famously, by Benedetto Croce). On the ­contrary, for Del Noce, Vico is the point of arrival of the Catholic philosophy of the seventeenth century, when it frees itself from the Cartesian chasm between interiority and history, by discovering “the natural ways of Providence in profane history.”89 In conclusion, Del Noce claims to have achieved his goal of ­reconstructing, in spite of their profound differences, “a unified ­development in the four major thinkers of the time of the Catholic Reformation: Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico.” Their continuity is determined by having a common adversary: atheism, in its first modern forms. Thereby, Del Noce rejects the frequent dismissal of modern Catholic philosophies as piecemeal, critically weak efforts at slowing down the juggernaut of “modernity” marching inexorably towards the elimination of transcendence. Conversely, “modern ­philosophy can only be defined problematically, in connection with

88 Section 9. 89 Section 10.

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the appearance of the problem of atheism, and its essential and ­irreducible lines of development are two, not one.” At the same time he also rejects the “Romantic” Catholic position that intends to answer modernity by literally returning to pre-­ Cartesian (medieval) philosophy as if no new questions had arisen. While the observation that modernity is defined by “the appearance of a new essence [i.e., atheism] confirms that the Cartesian beginning is inescapable, it rules out the idea of … a simple return to previous traditions. Although, of course, it does not rule out at all the ­possibility that a deeper study thereof may coincide with ­encountering those traditions, to the point of recognizing that new positions are explications of their virtualities.”90

These highlights cannot do justice, of course, to the breadth, depth, and originality of Del Noce’s work in “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism.” Building on some of the best French scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century (Laporte, Russier, Alquié, Gilson, Gouhier, Lenoble), he draws a comprehensive, unconventional, and (to this non-specialist) convincing picture of a crucial period in the history of ideas, with profound implications for our understanding of modernity and secularization. Today’s readers may wonder whether this tour de force is still directly relevant to “contemporary atheism,” which is quite different from Goldmann’s erudite, critical Marxism. It is rather symbolic that Goldmann died fairly young in 1970, when his highly “civilized” Marxism was arguably going out of fashion. If we had to name the atheistic thinkers from that time who have been most influential, we would probably mention Marcuse, or Foucault, or the structuralists. I would reply that the “myth of modernity” maintains a strong grip on our collective imagination, and so Del Noce’s refutation of its tendentious depiction of the history of European thought remains valuable and important.

4. On Ontologism At various points in the book, Del Noce refers sympathetically to Ontologism, a term which may be unfamiliar to some readers and give rise to misunderstandings. It was first used by Italian philosopher Vincenzo

90 Section 11.

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Gioberti (1801–52) but refers to a tradition of thought that goes back to Malebranche. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines it as the doctrine that “maintains that God and Divine ideas are the first object of our intelligence and the intuition of God the first act of our intellectual knowledge.”91 Besides Gioberti, several Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth century are associated with Ontologism, including Antonio Rosmini.92 Del Noce’s assessment of Ontologism is nuanced. While he is critical of both Malebranche and Gioberti,93 he thinks that Ontologism is very important as a tradition and a program, and that Rosmini’s version is “the only starting point for a reconstruction of metaphysics.”94 In The Problem of Atheism he describes it as “a religious school that derives from St Augustine … It insists on the soul’s immediate and lived contact with God, a direct experience against whose background the proofs of God take meaning and value.”95 Elsewhere he says that Ontologism is “a philosophy meant to define the form in which transcendent truth is present to our mind. It is true that this term is ambiguous: it can mean that the direct and immediate intuition of God is the condition for all human knowledge. In this sense it was condemned by Vatican I as a position logically close to rationalism and pantheism, in as much as it affirms the unity of divine reason and human reason.” However, that condemnation concerned “not Ontologism as such, but one particular form.”96 In Del Noce’s view, the historical significance of Ontologism is that it was the attempt by modern Christian thought to overcome a toxic divide between theological rationalism and religious existentialism. It 91 https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11257a.htm. 92 At that time Ontologism was very controversial: Jesuit Thomist theologians opposed it on the basis that “the immediate intuition of God and of His Divine ideas, as held by Ontologists, is above the natural power of man’s intelligence.” As a result, in 1887 the Holy Office condemned some “ontologistic” theses extracted from the works of Rosmini. However, his supporters kept claiming that he had been misunderstood, and they were finally vindicated in 2001 by a “Note” issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which “rehabilitated” Rosmini. For a review of the controversy see http://www.30giorni.it/articoli_id_15580_l3.htm. 93 See pages 390–2 for his critique of Malebranche. 94 Augusto Del Noce, “A proposito di una nuova edizione della ‘Teosofia’ del Rosmini,” Giornale di metafisica nos. 4–5 (1967): 405–19. Reprinted in Da Cartesio a Rosmini (Milan: Giuffrè, 1992), 537–52. 95 Page 387. 96 Del Noce, “A proposito di una nuova edizione della ‘Teosofia’ del Rosmini,” 541.

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started with Malebranche as a correction to the “existentialist” Pascal, and the “attempt to reaffirm humanism after the Pascalian critique defines, in my judgment, the history of modern Christian Ontologism.”97 While this attempt failed in Malebranche it continued in a “French-Italian” line of development that passed through Vico and finally came to fruition in Rosmini. In his mature work, the Theosophy,98 Rosmini was finally able to disassociate Ontologism from rationalism and from Idealism. In this process he re-encountered Thomism, but a Thomism reconciled with Augustinianism as a philosophy of the presence of God. Del Noce clearly did not view Rosmini’s form of Ontologism as opposed to Thomism but only to the “neo-Thomistic commentaries” of the nineteenth century. In fact, he believed that a “healthy Augustinianism” – meaning a rediscovery of the rational import of religious experience and of the correct relationship between fides and intellectum, healing the wounds of the age of the Reformation – was a necessary condition for a true return to St Thomas. It is significant that, in later years, Del Noce actually used the word “Ontologism” very rarely. To describe his position he referred either to Rosmini or to what he called “existential Thomism,” by which he meant precisely Thomism reconciled with Augustinianism in the interpretation of Étienne Gilson.99

5. Miscellanea Given the profusion of materials in The Problem of Atheism,100 and its complicated structure, having an exhaustive table of contents is

 97 Page 386.  98 Antonio Rosmini, Theosophy, trans. Denis Cleary and Terence Watson (Durham, UK: Rosmini House, 2007).  99 Regarding Del Noce’s appreciation for Gilson, I would like to refer the reader to the essay “Thomism and the Critique of Rationalism: Gilson and Shestov,” Communio 25, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 732–45. 100 I have not even mentioned many “tangential” parts of the book that do not fall within the three thematic areas I have considered, like section 7 of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem” on existentialism. Or section 12, which starts discussing Nietzsche but ends up being a long essay on Shestov. Or essay VII on “Political Theism and Atheism.” I also ignored many “sub-essays” that Del Noce “embeds” in his essays, discussing a vast array of authors and topics: Stirner, Sartre, Juvalta, Martinetti, Renouvier, Brunschvicg, Engels, Gentile, Marcel, Laberthonniere, Decadentism, Molinism, Occasionalism, Liberalism. The list goes on and on.

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important. Unfortunately, the table of contents in the Italian edition is rudimentary: it just lists the titles of the seven essays – the items numbered I, II, … VII in this volume – plus the Conclusion. To help the reader, in this English edition I expand it in two ways: (1) I list all the sections within each essay. Since essays II, III, and VI have no section titles, I took the liberty to write them myself for the table of contents. (2) I add outlines (in a smaller font, in parentheses below the section titles in the table of contents) for several sections of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.” Given the length of book, and the fact that some of its contents are rather specialized, I toyed with the idea of publishing, besides the complete translation, an abridged version. This turned out to be unfeasible, but I would like to offer what could be the table of contents of a book titled Selections from The Problem of Atheism. Even if it will probably never be published, it exists “virtually” within the present volume. Selections from The Problem of Atheism Order of Research

157–168

On Marxism Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” sections 2 and 3

190–214

Marxism and the Qualitative Leap section 2

222–30

The Concept of Atheism section 9

99–101

The Concept of Atheism section 11

114–40

On Modern Atheism Notes on Western Irreligion

231–71

Reflections on the Atheistic Option

272–307

The Concept of Atheism, section 1

7–34

On the History of Philosophy The Concept of Atheism opening

3–7

The Concept of Atheism section 4

50–60

The Pascal Problem sections 2, 3, and 4

318–35

Political Theism and Atheism

420–49

Conclusion

450–74

Regarding footnotes: I add my own footnotes marked by [TN] when some comment or explanation is in order. I add bibliographic references in English in square brackets next to Del Noce’s original citations

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when available. For works that were originally written in English, I typically just replace without comment Del Noce’s citation of a translation with one of the original works. In the older essays, the reader will notice a few footnotes entirely enclosed in square brackets. Those are comments that Del Noce himself added in 1964 to elaborate upon or correct some of his earlier statements. *** To conclude I want to acknowledge the support and encouragement that I have received from many readers of my two previous volumes of Del Noce translations. I also want to thank again the scholars and writers who have supported this work and helped make it known. I will add to my previous list Patrick J. Deneen, Thomas R. Rourke, Fran Maier, Margaret McCarthy, Margarita Mooney, Rod Dreher, and Paul Baumann. Thanks to Enzo Randone and Michele Rosboch for their support from Italy. Special thanks to Fieldstead and Company (and personally to Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Steve Ferguson, and Joe Gorra) for helping cover translation and production costs. Thanks, finally, to Philip Cercone and the McGill-Queen’s University Press staff for their excellent work. I would like to dedicate this translation to the memory of my dear father Giovanni Lancellotti (1935–2017), who communicated to me from a young age his love of “serious books.” For most readers of The Problem of Atheism, Del Noce’s references to the time in European history when educated people believed in the “immanence of the divine” will sound foreign and unfamiliar. Not so for those of us who grew up in a house with a big library that included a shelf laden with salmon-coloured Laterza editions of the works of Benedetto Croce.

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T H E P RO B L E M OF AT HEI SM

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I

The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem (1964)

The apparently essayistic nature of this book – and later I will explain in what sense this appearance is obligatory – makes its structure and unity hard to grasp. Therefore, it is useful to summarize the main theses and clarify their genesis, and also to elucidate how this investigation fits in today’s philosophical discourse, in order to show that today philosophies – all of them, in my judgment, but I will have to restrict myself to some examples – are in a bind from which they cannot escape (apart from always possible eclectic diversions) except by opening themselves up to the investigation that here I present as necessary. The length of this essay is justified by the fact that it refers not only to the present book but also to others, to be specified later, that are its necessary continuation. Moreover, it has been written after the other essays in this volume. I wished to keep them essentially unchanged, even though the second and the third date back to 1946 and 1948, respectively, because I felt that their thesis, which at that time certainly was not common, has been perfectly confirmed both by subsequent critical studies and by the present historical reality. Therefore, I will address a few possible objections and develop further a few points that may be obscure. I beg the kind reader to keep in mind the essential thesis, which is the motivation for the book, because I have never seen it clearly expressed elsewhere: The problematization of the phenomenon of atheism, as the primary datum of historical actuality1 – a problematization that is made necessary both by the 1 [TN] I reluctantly translate as “historical actuality” attualità storica, which, in turn, is the translation of the title of a well-known book by Fr Gaston Fessard SJ, De l’actualité

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The Problem of Atheism

problematic (postulatory) form in which atheism is forced to present itself today, and by the clear awareness, which has been reached over the last few decades, that it is the final stage of the philosophical direction that I will call rationalism – requires, as the “theoretically” primary question, the problematization of the standard view of the history of philosophy. Because today the way in which this history is presented also conditions practically our entire way of understanding and conceiving philosophy; indeed, whereas history of philosophy arose, in its first great model, as the historical verification of Hegelian philosophy, today its function has turned upside down, after historicism and the critique of evidences; the criterion of historical validity of a philosophy today comes down to being able to surpass and integrate previous positions of thought, explaining their genesis. Raising this issue is the ultimate question to which theological existentialism leads; this question coincides conclusively with that of the rigorous meaning to be given to the term “Ontologism” (this is, in the author’s judgment, the problem of philosophy after Heidegger).2 Posing this question seems to me to be the unifying locus of theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, political philosophy, or even, as we shall see later, of contemporary politics itself. It is the meeting point, in our time, of philosophy and life. Reflecting today on the historical actuality does not at all mean replacing the investigation of the eternal with an investigation of the ephemeral. It corresponds, instead, to the precise meaning of an oft-repeated sentence, that the task left to a philosopher today is to decipher a crisis. Because, today, the pari is forced on us by historical reality itself;3 in the period before ours it was

historique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960). I must confess I could not find a good English counterpart of actualité/attualità, which conveys both “being present” and “being real.” Fr Fessard’s own explanation of this concept is quoted by Del Noce in note 1 on page 237. 2 We must observe that the crucial importance of the question of “history of philosophy as a problem” was already perceived by Heidegger himself in What Is Philosophy?, trans. J.T. Wilde and W. Kluback (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958). Where, even if my thesis is not stated – that the question about the history of philosophy is the primary problem of philosophy after Marx and after Nietzsche (i.e., after atheism) – clearly we are only one step away. 3 The pari draws its power from being imposed by our human situation, so that abstention is impossible without giving up our humanity: one is “obligés à jouer.” However, for Pascal this obligation followed from the Port-Royalist conception of

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I. The Concept of Atheism 5

possible to speak of a moral unity, independent of any religious confession or any metaphysical or anti-metaphysical assertion.4 At that time, even philosophers who had abandoned theism recognized as an unquestionable fact the existence of an ethics of which Christianity was supposed to be the perfect form. Think of the following curious sentence by Schopenhauer, which is among the most characteristic, I think, to describe this attitude: “that principle … about the content of which all moral philosophers are actually in agreement … neminem laede, immo omnes quantum potest juva. This is actually the proposition which all teachers of morality exert themselves to ground … [to find] the real foundation of ethics, which, like the philosophers’ stone, has been sought for millennia.”5 So, the problem of the 1800s, the old problem of morals, was not the problem of morality, whose nature was not in question, but that of its foundation, and of the legitimacy or not of the quest for a foundation. In a sense, we can see in Croce’s very well-known, conciliatory essay “Why We Cannot Not Call Ourselves Christians” the last expression of

damnation and hell, from the identification of religious truth with Jansenist theology. In the neo-Pelagianism of natural religion, for example, the pari becomes completely meaningless (hence Voltaire’s criticism; but it would be particularly interesting to study Locke’s “moral politics” from the angle of the transfer of Pascal’s pari to ethics; this theme was touched upon by R. Polin in La politique morale de John Locke [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960], 16n6). Today, by contrast, abstention is impossible due to the fact that it implies giving up the awareness of one’s own decisions, and thus giving up on being human, and suffering passively the course of events. In short, abstention is impossible due to the failure of the last form of Pelagianism, “autonomous morality.” Thus, this is one aspect of the complete opposition between the situation of our historical period and that of the period from 1870 to 1914. People generally do not define with sufficient precision how radical this opposition is, and I will come back to it later on. 4 A typical example is the scarcely known short book Précis raisonné de moral pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1930) by André Lalande, a French philosopher who died recently at the age of almost one hundred. He took especially to heart the quest for moral collaboration, independent of any reference to a precise religion or metaphysics (his Vocabulaire also fits in this context). Using an expression associated with Eric Voegelin, we can say that current ethical-political life defines itself as the end of the system of the “minimum dogma,” in which all must believe, while everybody remains free to adopt other beliefs, as long as they do not conflict with the “minimum dogma.” 5 [TN] A. Schopenhauer, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. D.E. Cartwright and E.E. Ermann (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 150–1.

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this secularism that presents itself as Christianity.6 In a summary formula, we can say that the typical character of nineteenth-century secularism was to halt its critique in front of morals (and the refusal to do so shows us the prophetic character of Nietzsche’s thought for our present situation). Conversely, today the recognition of the plurality of moral criteria, and the correlative negation that there is such a thing as absolute and definitive ethics, is the primary assertion of what calls itself secular thought. The injunction of the new secularism is that we must be tolerant of every form of thought, except one: that which presents itself as the assertion of an absolute and definitive truth. Deep down, there is this thought: traditional Christian ethics corresponds to the historical stage when nature was not dominated; man’s total dominion of nature coincides with the disappearance of ethics, at least in the aspect whereby it means renunciation, sacrifice, asceticism. Thus, the victory of technology is correlated with the simultaneous disappearance of religion and ethics; that is, technical progress makes possible complete naturalism. We only have to browse newspapers and magazines to see how much judgments based on this type of idea get to permeate common opinion and, reciprocally, are required by this opinion. So, we can say: in the 1800s secularism was tightly linked with Kantian morality; now, nothing is more foreign to the new secularism than Kantian morality, and this process is, within secularism, irreversible. Or, in sum: today’s plurality of moralities attests, in each of them, an implicit answer, positive or not, to the metaphysical problem; the pari, for or against God, imposes itself in every tiny act of daily life. Or, again (it is the same observation, developed in another form): the non-unifiable multiplicity, and thus the gratuitousness, of philosophies and the question of atheism define the situation of contemporary thought in terms very analogous to those faced by Descartes,7 whose Meditations must be read as the first classical work of philosophy written 6 [TN] Benedetto Croce, “Perchè non possiamo non dirci cristiani,” La Critica 55 (1942): 289–97. 7 This is why, on the one hand, the trivial criterion of their originality – or, as people would rather say today, of their authenticity – has become widespread, replacing that of truth; and why, on the other hand, there is the conviction that all philosophical problems are vacuous, except those about the methodology of science or the analysis of language, as a mental prophylaxis that is destined to annihilate all the problems of tradition from Plato, we can say, until Marx [TN: in the original this is a long parenthetical statement in the main text].

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against the atheists (and not against the Gentiles, like the Thomistic Summa, simply in the sense that at the time of St Thomas there was no atheism to speak of, in a rigorous sense). Except that, to Descartes, atheism presented itself in the form of skepticism, which denied, besides religion, science and morality; its critique was a matter of highlighting and problematizing its underlying materialistic dogmatism. By reason of this, the alternative presented in the Meditations was between the affirmation of the existence of God and total aphasia (since the atheist cannot affirm the truth of science, nor that of the external world, nor even that of the existence of the I). Now, instead, atheism presents itself as a thesis proved by history, and as the salvation of science and morality; hence, it no longer poses as the primary question the problem of the reality of the external world but, rather, the problem of the history of philosophy. Thus, the history of philosophy as a problem seems to be, in my judgment, the present formulation of the methodical doubt. If then one wishes to find a corroboration of this investigation, my advice would be to think of Laporte’s Rationalisme de Descartes,8 paying special attention to the initial pages on the concept of rationalism. This for two reasons: because the problem of rationalism in Descartes is, in some respect, the same problem as the rationalism and immanentism of modern philosophy – due to the fact that when one constructs the history of modern philosophy the Cartesian beginning is necessary, as I will discuss later (pages 330–4); and because of the decisive indirectly theoretical importance (which will be clarified later, in essay VI) of that book, which is only apparently just historical (Laporte’s profile is, rather, that of a “philosopher through history”). Let us now comment on each one of the sentences in italics.

1. On the Concept of Atheism According to the overall definition I reach in essay V, atheism is the endpoint at which rationalism must necessarily arrive when it is most consistent, which is also when it enters its crisis. Namely, when it transitions from metaphysical rationalism to skeptical rationalism, or

8 Jean Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945).

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historicist rationalism, or irrationalism (this latter being the position of thought whose initiator can only be said to be Nietzsche). Hence its three essential and irreducible forms: negative or nihilistic atheism, positive or political atheism, and tragic atheism, which concludes in “philosophical madness.” I think the word “tragic” cannot be given any other meaning, in philosophy, than that of an experience of thought ending inevitably in that particular “philosophical madness” that lies out of the reach of psychiatrists and that,9 therefore, seems to require to be surpassed (but to where? Is it the announcement of total nihilism as moral or cosmic suicide? Or can it be surpassed by some form of positive atheism? Or is it rather the announcement of a new God or of a renewal of religious life? These are, we know, the classic questions of Nietzschean criticism).10  9 This character of the madness of the “tragic” philosopher par excellence, Nietzsche, is no longer a matter of discussion after the fundamental studies by Podach. There is only one similar case in the history of philosophy, that of Lequier, a philosopher who felt he was the initiator of true Christian philosophy but, at the same time, was tempted by radical atheism, just like Nietzsche the “Anti-Christ” was troubled by a constant Christian temptation. Furthermore, if we look, in their philosophies, for the process that leads to madness, we observe a very strange thematic affinity. Can this be a way, never attempted before, to define, in philosophy, the concept of the “tragic”? Let us also notice: Nietzsche is the philosopher who, in effect, most dissociates German thought from other trends in European thought; the same attempt at dissociation is carried out by Lequier with respect to French thought. Is it not peculiar that these radical dissociations coincide with the tragic moments of German thought and of French thought? I postpone a discussion of this topic to another occasion. 10 I was finishing these pages when I became aware of the extremely remarkable essay by Fr Cornelio Fabro, “Osservazioni critiche sulla nozione di ‘ateismo,’” Euntes Docete 16, no. 2 (1963): 197–221. It was with true joy that I found in it views that are almost identical with those presented in this book; this is even more noteworthy because the language is different. Here I can only highlight a few among the many points on which we agree. Against the tendency to resolve atheism into practical atheism, which is extremely widespread among recent theologians, Fr Fabro perfectly remarks: “but the situation is less simple, if viewed from within modern thought. The issue is the following: atheism is not and cannot be a starting point, but constitutes the point of arrival of a certain conception of the world and of man, that is, of a qualified ‘resolution’ of being, both of man and of the world” (200). Now, what else do I intend to say when I criticize the explanation of atheism as anti-theism (see essay V) and when, instead, I recognize atheism as the consequential ultimate point of arrival of rationalism? Just as correctly Fr Fabro observes, regarding atheism before the modern age, that it consists of “sporadic affirmations … which could be refuted by making appeal to the fundamental realistic principle” (202). I have denied altogether that we

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In our century we observe atheism’s necessary transition from its scientistic to its postulatory form, a necessity that befalls Marxism itself when it intends to take a rigorously critical form (see essays V and VI). In truth, this optative aspect of atheism, as arbitrary postulation, had already been highlighted by all its previous critics. Thusly Descartes himself had pointed out that it is arbitrary to elevate the existence of extended reality to an evidence valid in itself, independently of any reference to those of the I and of God, and for him judgment is an act of free will; thusly Rousseau (and it will never be emphasized enough that he is Kant’s only true teacher)11 recognized in the atheistic doubt the decision to will God not to be (a thesis that in Kant will take the can speak of atheism before the modern age; but not in the sense of denying that in the Middle Ages we can find sporadic manifestations of atheistic temptations or objections; rather, in the sense that in the Middle Ages atheism is present as atheism that is defeated and necessarily destined to be defeated, while I intended to deal only with atheism that presents itself as the invincible conclusion of a specific line of thought, which therefore must be criticized at its original starting point. So, there is also full agreement, I think, on this point. Father Fabro describes the modern age (198) as characterized from the start by positive and constructive atheism, whereas I reserve this term for Marxist atheism and, in intention, for that of Nietzsche, while I deem the atheism of the 1600s and 1700s to be negative and nihilistic. But also in this case I think that the difference is merely terminological because Fr Fabro characterizes this modern atheism in terms of “reclaiming man’s originality in front of nature” (199), and I have insisted on the priority of the historical-political moment over the scientistic one in the formation of atheism (pages 300–1), and spotted the first form of consistent atheism in the libertine inversion of humanism. As for his thesis that the principle of immanence is the “essential step” in the formation of atheism, it coincides perfectly with the concept of rationalism I propose. The agreement with what he says about the attempt to save religiosity in Marxist atheism is also perfect. I would like to add that, when the atheist negation is made to coincide with the negation of religiosity, as in Nietzsche, we have the beginning of the critical crisis of atheism. There is also perfect agreement on how to characterize atheistic existentialism. The point, instead, on which there may be a (superable?) disagreement concerns the fact that Fr  Fabro attributes the principle of immanence to Descartes himself, whereas one of the starting points of my research is the critique of the rationalist interpretation of Descartes, developed by Laporte. Certainly, on this point the difference is not negligible. This is because if one accepts the thesis about the rationalism of Descartes, one must come to understand the whole process of modern philosophy as directed towards radical atheism; while instead, in my judgment, the rise of atheism characterizes modern philosophy only problematically. 11 Not so Hume, whose thought he warped; such warping made possible the form in which he realized criticism.

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form of the postulates of practical reason and the connection between moral consciousness and religious consciousness). But the distinguishing feature of contemporary atheism is that it affirms itself recognizing this postulatory character; that is, it rejects the aspect whereby Kantian thought can be presented as an itinerary towards God – the Critique of Pure Reason serving as an introduction to the Critique of Practical Reason – and it always declares itself to be an extension of Kant’s critique of metaphysics so radical that it cuts off the roots of the Critique of Practical Reason. Now, this formal recognition of the postulatory character of atheism has, in my view, the function of bringing to light the primary option that lies at the foundation of rationalism (and of irrationalism, as its reverse) and, thereby, of making possible its internal criticism. However, what do I mean by this word “rationalism”? Just what Laporte gets to in the introductory pages of Rationalisme de Descartes,12 which are devoted to elucidating this concept: “the stance taken towards religion is … decisive. A rationalist accepts religion, as long as it is rational religion, which translates the affirmations of reason into symbolic language, or limits itself to the very awareness we have of reason, as the principle of universal communication among men. He rejects every transcendence. He shuts himself inside immanence because he thinks that reason, our reason, does not rely on anything else, that it does not need to complete itself with anything else, that therefore it does not need to be concerned with any beyond. He will come to terms, if anything, with the unknowable. He will never tolerate the supernatural.” In other words – I believe I can continue as follows, in the spirit of Laporte’s indication – we must distinguish between the true definition of rationalism, which can only be formulated in terms of its opposition to the supernatural, and the definition of rationalism within rationalism itself, which reduces it to a gnoseological position (ending in dogmatism, contrarily to empiricism, which ends in skepticism). Continuing this discussion would lead us to  show the superiority of Pascal’s criticism, which is open to the

12 Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes, xix. Definitely, starting from this definition one must conclude that in ancient thought there is no atheism in a proper sense. In fact, the prevalent trend in the field today is oriented in that direction. For example, regarding the denial that there is such a thing as true and proper atheism in Diagoras of Melos, the “atheist” of antiquity, see the important communication by Italo Lana, “Diagora di Melo,” Atti dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 84 (1949–50): 161–205.

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supernatural, over Kant’s, which is conditioned by a presupposed closedness to it (or better, a closedness resulting from a moral motivation).13 Being conditioned by this initial negation of the supernatural, or of the “miracle” in the broadest sense, or of the tria mirabilia that fecit Deus, res ex nihilo, liberum arbitrium, Hominem Deum, according to Descartes’s initial intuition,14 rationalism can only lead to the affirmation of the normality of the human situation, viewed either optimistically (“reality is what it must be,” Hegel’s criticism of the Sollen) or pessimistically (worldly reality is what it necessarily is). Then, spiritual life can be presented as a search for liberation oriented necessarily towards nothingness or else as acceptance of life in a disposition that goes necessarily “beyond good and evil.” Such consideration of rationalism leads necessarily to a different definition of empiricism. To be more precise, it leads to distinguishing three meanings of it. According to the first meaning, empiricism denotes a philosophical line that is subordinate to rationalism in opposition (empiricism as skepticism: in this sense Lachelier used to say that skepticism is the consequence, which keeps raising its head, of empiricism). According to the second meaning – which is the one I referred to, because it is the most common, when I talked (essay IV) about the loss of the sacred in the affluent society and about bourgeois society as structured philosophically by empiricism – it intends to reaffirm itself beyond rationalism but after having accepted its negations; then the most appropriate terms to indicate it is positivism (science against theology and metaphysics). The verifiable is regarded as the only reality; the non-verifiable as a subjective illusion, which will be explained by depth psychology and by sociology, even though it will never be possible to eliminate from the positivist version of empiricism a shadow of agnosticism; therefore, the transcendent is not denied in itself, but in its human

13 The pages in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason that oppose the belief in miracles, a belief that is not part of pure religiosity in as much as this latter is based on moral faith, are decisive. It would be important to clarify to what extent the denial of the supernatural acted since the beginning, in a decisive fashion, on the formation of Kant’s moral thought, and led it to a warped vision of theological doctrines. 14 It seems to me that his passage from the Cogitationes privatae, about the unbreakable link between affirming the creator God and free will, reveals the original starting point of Cartesianism.

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expressions.15 According to the third meaning – which is absolutely opposed to the second, as empiricism coming after the critique of rationalism – it means affirming the plurality and irreducibility of the levels of experience (the empiricist attitude as acceptance of plurality), with a complete refusal to view the lowest as the deepest – that is, of the scientistic spirit. Thus, such empiricism is not tied to the affirmation that the verifiable has higher value than the unverifiable; it can be developed in terms of a methodology of the unverifiable; it does not stand in conflict at all with the affirmation of the validity of religion or at least of the possibility of the transcendent, and actually it can even agree with Ontologism as a philosophy of metaphysical experience. The proof of this can be found in a curious note by Laporte, in which he says that Malebranchism, by replacing the Cartesian proof with the presence of God, is the natural outcome of the philosophy of Descartes,16 which he defines as the example of a radical and integral empiricism. But what matters most is that, because of this empiricism, Laporte is led to affirm a tight kinship between the positions of Pascal and Hume, which seems amazing. Let us consider this point as summarized by one of his students, Jeanne Russier: “Pascal’s universe, like Hume’s, is a universe of radical contingency. Everything is possible, because the necessary, that whose contrary is impossible, cannot be found anywhere. And this universe of Pascal, at least as much as that of Hume, this universe in which contingency is nothing but the scientific name of what could be called, from another perspective, gratuitousness, is what Laporte, after having taken Hume’s side against Kant, described in the conclusion of his critique of the Idea of necessity.”17 From this point of view, radical empiricism is

15 The greatest adversary of this second form of empiricism can be recognized in Marcel, in the name of a metaphysical empiricism originating from Schelling – so that one of the most exact characterizations of his thought is the one that sees it as a “methodology of the unverifiable.” See the beautiful book by Pietro Prini, Gabriel Marcel e la metodologia dell’inverificabile (Rome: Studium, 1950). What will be said later about the relation between Marxist atheism and the irreligion of the affluent society – which cannot but identify with the empiricism of the verifiable – makes it possible to define the exact limitation of Marcel’s thought  – whose importance today seems to me to be underrated – and the form in which it can be continued in order to interpret and overcome the present crisis. 16 Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes, 290n3. 17 Jeanne Russier, “L’Expérience du Mémorial et la conception pascalienne de la connaissance,” in Blaise Pascal: l’Homme et l’Ouvre, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1956), 230–2.

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an entirely open philosophy that, consequently, is inclined to admit the possibility of miracles. It is ultimately Pascal’s philosophy, if one accepts his assertion that “truth is a person” and a person is not proven but grasped in an immediate experience, when it accepts to make himself known and we accept to be attentive to this revelation. Starting from an initial opposition to the philosophies of necessity of Spinoza and Hegel, Laporte gets to set in opposition, in a form that is the opposite of the positivist one, Hume and Kant, in the name of a philosophy of contingent experience, which affirms that the constancy of the laws of nature does not manifest the existence of “necessary connections.”18 This perspective directs his two complementary books, the Idée de nécéssité (1941) and the Conscience de la liberté (1946), the latter being an investigation of what pure experience can lead to in the field of metaphysics, whose importance nobody in Italy, and very few in France, as far as I know, has noticed. In Laporte’s assertion about the incommensurability (unknown to rationalism) between knowledge of persons and knowledge of things, we can definitely discern a clearly existential stance, even though he is not fond of this word. Thus, the point that should be studied more deeply is the possibility of an agreement between the religious philosophy of existence and empiricism as an open philosophy, in the third sense; or, more precisely, of an agreement among philosophy of existence, empiricism, and Ontologism. But this is a problem that can be methodically addressed only much later after the investigations in this book.

18 Regarding this thesis on the Pascal-Hume relationship, I believe we must say it is decisively important in this respect: there are two possible forms of criticism, Pascal’s and Kant’s, and the preeminent value of the former can stand out clearly only if one is able to prove that Hume has not been overcome by Kant. Laporte’s historical research should have logically concluded, and all premises had already been stated, in the opposition Hume against Kant. However, does it follow that Hume sends us back to Pascal? This is what leaves me unconvinced because Hume’s critique of rationalism does not call into question its original presupposition, which is why it must take the form of empiricism. Hence the unique ambiguity of this thinker whom other scholars – certainly less correctly than Laporte, and yet with some appearance of verisimilitude – have compared to Feuerbach rather than to Pascal; hence, also, his solitude (can we say that he had any real continuators since the positivists certainly were not?). The solitude, in the sense of non-continuation, that standard historiography attributes to Pascal must rather be referred, in my judgment, to Hume.

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Setting aside this unconventional meaning of empiricism, and sticking to the one that is unquestionably more common, we observe that it is marked both by a constant subordination to rationalism, so that it accepts its negations, and, from another angle, by a constant ulteriority to it, so that it represents its crisis. The crisis becomes definitive when rationalism reaches its insuperable form, as I think happened with Marxism; hence the particular relationship between Communism and the affluent society, which I will discuss shortly; hence, also, the question whether rationalism that has made itself total brings about the fullness of nihilism, just like a still imperfect stage of its formation was associated with skepticism. Let us now return to the thesis that atheism is the end stage of a process of thought that produces, in its first expression, the “systems” of metaphysical rationalism (closed systematics is essential to metaphysical rationalism). History is there to confirm this relationship. Of what else is libertine atheism the consequence, if not of the decay of Brunism?19 Perhaps, if we consider libertine thought in its most rigorous expression, and do not confuse it with a practical attitude, we can define precisely the classical problem of the relationship between Spinoza and Bruno: the essential motif of Brunism is reconfirmed in Spinoza after the libertine disintegration and the Cartesian antithesis, symmetrically to the Marxist reconfirmation of Hegelianism after its disintegration in the Hegelian left. This is confirmed by the fact that the post-Bruno and post-Spinoza strands of atheism essentially converge; however, here I cannot linger on this problem, and I will only point out that it needs to be investigated. The one-sided, but possible, materialistic version of Spinozism is found in the atheistic, post-Diderot strand of the Enlightenment.20 Regarding the Marxist continuation of Hegelianism, the process is too well known. As for irrationalist atheism, does it not represent the decay of Schopenhauer’s system, which is, yes, the exact

19 Researching Bruno’s subterranean influence on irreligion in the 1600s and early 1700s, even before it encountered that of Spinoza, is a theme of great importance that has never been studied analytically, as far as I know. To frame the question, see the remarkable chapter by G. Spini in his (otherwise questionable) Ricerca dei libertini (Rome: Universale di Roma, 1950). See also the short but rigorous remarks by A. Guzzo in his Giordano Bruno (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1960), 271–2. 20 See P. Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Revolution, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).

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inversion of Hegelian rationalism, but still within rationalism, understood in the sense I said? The four essential forms of atheism display certain common features. The systematic structure that epitomizes the “closedness” of metaphysical rationalism is dismantled in the name of a reconciliation with reality and with the scientific trends (with political and social reality measured by Machiavellianism in the libertines; with the progressivism of the “parti philosophique” in Enlightenment atheism; with reality as historical becoming in Marxism; with life in Nietzsche). This reconciliation requires the elimination of the Christian elements in the metaphysical forms of rationalism, present in the guise of preservation of religion in philosophy. Finally, in every form of atheism the critique of transcendent religions relies on the argument that by now their historical time is over (the “God-is-dead” theme). Now, if rationalism can only take shape by rejecting the status naturae lapsae, the primary theme that characterizes it must be identified in the rejection of the biblical notion of sin. Apparent Christian elements can be found in every form of rationalism, but they are completely transmogrified precisely in connection with a different conception of sin. This also explains how Marxism connects with the first elaboration of revolutionary thought – which arises, with Rousseau, in a philosophical context directly opposed to the “pari philosophique,” but which nonetheless is characterized by a new conception of sin (295ff) – and brings it to its extreme and insuperable consequences, making it atheistic. Let us now review, quickly, the essential texts of rationalism about sin, and observe that they are fundamentally identical. There is Bruno’s famous passage in Spaccio della bestia trionfante, which says that the Fall was necessary, and has been salutary, because man’s morality is not innocence but knowledge of good and evil; not by chance, this is the text that so much enthused Spaventa. The texts by Spinoza are equally well known:21 original sin is simply erased altogether because the idea that God is the cause of everything rules out the notion of “sin.” Scripture talks about it because it addresses the commoners and is

21 The most important passages are found in the correspondence with Blyernberg, letters XIX and XXI. For some other references, see Theologico-Political Treatise, chap. 19; Political Treatise, chap. 2, 18–23 and chap. 4, 4; Ethics, chap. 4, 3, sec. 2. His well-known criticism of the virtue of penance evidently implies the negation of sin. About the importance of his correspondence with Blyernberg, see A. Guzzo, Il pensiero di Spinoza (Florence: Vallecchi, 1924; Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1963), 102ff.

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forced to express itself more humano; when Spinoza wants to interpret the biblical story allegorically, then we find also in him the idea of the positivity of sin. But what are supremely interesting are, in particular, the passages by Hegel that I already briefly discussed in essay V (291n28). Let us recall a few more. “The Fall is therefore the eternal Mythus of Man – in fact, the very transition by which he becomes man. Persistence in this standpoint is however, Evil, and the feeling of pain at such a condition, and of longing to transcend it, we find it in David, when he says: ‘Lord create for me a new heart, a new steadfast spirit.’ This feeling we observe even in the account of the Fall; though an announcement of Reconciliation is not made there, but rather one of continuance in misery. Yet we have in this narrative the prediction of reconciliation … still more profoundly expressed where it is stated that when God saw that Adam had eaten of that tree, he said, ‘Behold Adam is become as one of us knowing Good and Evil.’ God confirms the words of the serpent.”22 About these passages, I think it is worth quoting M. Carrouges’s particularly astute comment: Adam’s rebellion is the beginning of salvation. For Christianity creation is excellent in itself according to the words of God Himself. Just for that reason, then, Adam’s sojourn on earth deserved to be called Paradise. Also, the status of creature given to Adam made his rebellious deed against the Creator and his mad will to be like the Almighty absurd and impious at the same time. For Hegel, on the contrary, since Creation is the Fall, Paradise can only be an illusion; the fact that the first man believes he is happy at birth, and that he recognizes a Creator as his master, can only be the worst decline, because he makes his misfortune irremediable. But, conversely, if he stands up boldly, if he aspires to much more than Paradise, if he wants to become like God, then everything will be saved: having recovered the memory of his divine origin, and possessing the will to climb back to the vertex of the firmament, man will end up surmounting the division within divine nature. By challenging the pseudo-Creator, he is not guilty of usurpation, but on the contrary he marks forcefully the beginning of a legitimate attempt at recovery … For Hegel, the greatness of Christianity is evidently giving the

22 G.F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: Bohn, 1861), 333–4 [TN: the emphasis in the last sentence is Del Noce’s].

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world the notion of this challenge by the first man, but its weakness is viewing it as a fault.23

Against the Aufklärung, Hegel conceived a way of surpassing Christianity that does not erase it but preserves it. Now, just as we wondered whether Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics was conditioned by the initial rejection of sin, I think we are even more justified to view Hegel’s conception of original sin as the first datum of his philosophy of religion, the true reason the dogmas of Christian religion are, yes, preserved by him, but within a general subversion of theology. Indeed, of all Christian dogmas, which one appears in Hegelianism with a completely inverted meaning, so that it is impossible to say that it is preserved? It is also clear that this initial inversion of the interpretation of original sin started a process of thought that could not but lead to formulating the most radical antithesis of Christianity. Of the many ways in which one can prove the necessary continuity between Hegelianism and Marxism, this is perhaps the most valid. Finally, there is Schopenhauer. His insistence on the theme of original sin, as the only positive moment in biblical thought, takes in him the anti-biblical meaning that existence is guilt. What he denies in Hegel is not that the appearing of individual and particular beings is evil in itself, but that this evil is a condition for the highest good; that is, the process leading to the philosophy of history. However, it is clear that this shared thesis about the nature of sin cannot but coincide with the thesis that guilt is ontological, inscribed in the very structure of finite being or, from the moral standpoint, in the reduction of individualism to egoistic will. Hence comes the ideal of spiritual life as comprehension and justification of the real, achieved by taking the point of view of the universal; or as annihilation into Nirvana-extinction; or as Revolution that must replace the I with the we, individual man with collective man – who lives by participating in the species, which is the only reality – transferring personhood from the individual to the collectivity. Furthermore, since there are only two fundamental explanations of the problem of evil, that of Genesis and that contained in the myth of Anaximander, we can also say that atheism – which is in a proper sense

23 M. Carrouges, La mystique du surhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 18ff.

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a position subsequent to Christianity because it comes after the ideas of Revelation and Supernatural, and constitutes their criticism – can be viewed, in its generality, as the final outcome of the re-comprehension of Christianity within the interpretation of evil that had already been formulated in the fragment of Anaximander (even though it becomes transfigured and not easily recognizable because of the re-comprehension, and even though the thinkers of metaphysical rationalism or of atheism have generally not paid any particular attention to this text, apart from Nietzsche).24 Regarding the thesis (pages 282–3) that atheism begins only during the conclusion-dissolution of the Renaissance, the historian who has been called “the enemy of anachronism” par excellence, Lucien Febvre, has my back. In his work aimed at demolishing the usual picture of the sixteenth century as an age of irreligion and as the beginning of a process that leads to the age of Enlightenment, he wrote: “ [in the sixteenth century there is only] the unbelief of despair … or perhaps the unbelief that was a revolt against the triumph of injustice: ‘If there is a God, and he is good, how can he let evil be done?’ But does that question really go very far? In any case, it is one of the questions to which religions – above all Christianity – have a ready answer and one that is to the point … And it is utter madness to make Rabelais the first in a linear series at the tail end of which we put the ‘freethinkers’ of the twentieth century (supposing, moreover, that they are a single block and do not differ profoundly from each other in turn of mind, scientific experience,

24 It seems to me that this definition of the historical situation of atheism matches exactly the “pagan re-comprehension of Christianity” that Kierkegaard talked about in reference to Hegelianism. It is important to point out that it stands in opposition to the usual definition of the spirit of modern philosophy, understood as transition to intra-worldly transcendence and thereby in complete opposition to ancient ontology, reached through the radical secularization of Christian anthropology. I think, on the contrary, that we must speak of a re-comprehension of the Christian novelty within ancient categories. Regarding Anaximander’s myth, Nietzsche’s classic text on the fragment of Anaximander is in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). In contemporary philosophy, it is recalled for theoretical purposes, besides in Heidegger’s famous essay, in Shestov, according to whom all the categories of “speculative philosophy” depend on the theory of evil formulated in it; and in Shestov’s precise opposite, Benda, although I am not not aware that he mentions Anaximander’s name explicitly.

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and particular arguments).”25 If anything, he has my back too much, I daresay, because hatred of anachronism inclines Febvre to immobilize ideas, somehow cutting them off from their movement, and to discern the meaning of a work only in the awareness its author had of it. Whereas it is unquestionable that in the 1500s – which may well be recognized, per his judgment, as a very Christian century overall – there are also the germs that lead to Bruno’s synthesis and to the subsequent libertine atheism; even though Febvre is perfectly correct when he rejects the idea of a “linear sequence.” As I already said, the three forms of atheism, taking this word in the most rigorous sense, are irreducible. The question of the linear sequence brings me to discuss an objection that could be raised about my denial that there is a “development of atheism” (page 287) while, on the other hand, it may seem that I see in atheism the conclusion of modern rationalism. Now, I do not think that we can speak of continuity even in reference to metaphysical rationalisms because, in Spinoza, there are various ­possibilities of development (I had or I will have here the occasion to recall the naturalistic possibility – in eighteenth-century materialism and in the form of positivism closest to materialism, that of Ardigò – that of Hegel and those of Martinetti and Brunschvicg; also, cannot we speak, with some reason, of Spinozism in Heidegger?); and because Hegelianism can only ignore, as it has done in all its forms, Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the process from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and also the line of religious pessimism (Spir, von Hartmann, Martinetti). A fortiori it is impossible to speak of continuity among forms of atheism because each one of them pushes to the extreme consequences the rationalistic form from which it derives. Thus, the distance between Marx and Nietzsche is greater than that between Hegel and Schopenhauer (shall we say the greatest that ever occurred in the history of philosophy?). We shall see later what this recognition implies. To be more precise, one can discern a (non-dialectic) continuity in the history of negative atheism due to the particular relationship, which I just mentioned, between Bruno and Spinoza; but not in the least a process of development from negative atheism to positive atheism. Marx continues Hegel and, in a different respect, Rousseau, and not, despite what people

25 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 459–60.

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have said,26 Lamettrie or Baron d’Holbach. If this second continuity were true, one should conclude that Marx continues … the Marquis de Sade – that is, the anti-Rousseau in every respect, as will be said later (page 288n25). De Sade’s work is the most complete encyclopaedia of the themes of libertine atheism in its eighteenth-century form, in which there is certainly something to be learned from the philosophical standpoint but as a clarification of the impossibility of combining negative atheism, in its ultimate conclusions, with humanitarian morality – indeed, the essential point of de Sade’s thought is the complementarity between the negation of God, viewed as the original culprit, and the negation of the other – and a clarification of the origins of decadentism in negative atheism. I am certainly not unaware that people are building a gallery of “unmaskers” that includes characters as different as Machiavelli, Sade, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and possibly Pareto; this gallery is strictly analogous to the eighteenth-century gallery of the heroes of free thought, except that the characters have changed. But never mind … whoever enjoys this exercise, go ahead; all that needs to be said is that it has nothing to do with history. Or do they intend to say, childishly, that dialectical materialism means “materialism plus dialectics”? In actuality, there is nothing in eighteenth-century materialism that justifies a possible development in a dialectic direction.

26 This is Plekhanov’s well-known perspective  – on the subject, see the acute remarks by A. Gramsci in Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin: Einaudi, 1948), 151–2. It must consistently lead to the exaltation of Spinoza, viewed in his naturalistic aspect, as Marx’s true precursor. On this matter one must mention the influence of Lange’s work, which has been enormous both on Marxists and nonMarxists. The former, starting from the idea that Marxist materialism was just traditional materialism with the addition of dialectics, studied in Lange traditional materialism and came to the idea of a continuity from Holbach to Helvétius to Marx. The latter, like Croce in his first Marxist writings of 1896–99, having observed correctly that Marxism is totally irreducible to the materialism studied by Lange, consistently came to deny the materialistic character of Marx’s thought. We can say that Lange’s book conditioned the whole historical perspective of both Italian neo-­ Kantians and Idealists regarding materialism and atheism. See, for example, G. De Ruggiero’s judgment in 1941: “The History of Materialism is the most beautiful and friendliest book produced by German philosophy over the last fifty years” (La filosofia contemporanea, 4th ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1941], 70). It is true that this was a new edition of a book that dated back to 1912. But De Ruggiero stated in the introduction that he stood by all his judgments, except the one about Spaventa’s thesis on the nationality of philosophy.

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Another objection might concern the reduction (page 283) of the forms of atheism to negative atheism, positive atheism – the latter being essentially identified with Marx’s atheism – and Nietzsche’s tragic atheism. What gives me the right to talk about Schopenhauer’s philosophy only as the beginning of a line leading to a form of atheism, when he explicitly declares that his inseparable adversaries are optimism, theism, and Judaism? Also, what place should we give to Comte’s atheism? Or to atheistic existentialism, be it that of the 1800s (Stirner’s, for example), that which rose unexpectedly in French philosophy after the war (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc.), or that of Nicolai Hartmann? Above all, why did I not talk about aesthetic atheism, that is, the one that finds in art its essential expression, symmetrically to Marxist atheism’s expression in politics? How can a consideration of atheism, especially of contemporary atheism, be exhaustive without taking into account, for example, Surrealism? Regarding this last point I can only admit that there is a gap. But in a book one cannot say everything; and I will touch upon this topic, although briefly, when I discuss decadentism, as a continuation of negative atheism. So, according to this objection, I forgot pessimistic and religious atheism, positivist atheism, existentialist atheism, ethical atheism, aesthetic atheism. Now, the formula that is commonly used to describe Schopenhauer’s thought, “religious atheism” (which is completely different, needless to say, from the “atheistic religion” in which Marxism finds its consistent form), signals, if we look carefully, a contradiction. I have insisted (essay V) on this essential motif: I am considering not this or that declaration of atheism, which could be found in any epoch, but only the forms of atheism that present themselves as necessary endpoints of some line of thought and that cannot be surpassed within this line, so that their criticism must address such direction of thought at its root. Having stipulated this, we can remark that Schopenhauer’s religious critique of Hegelianism is still dependent on Hegel in opposition. This dependence manifests itself in the devaluation of the finite, in the identification of individual will with selfish will, and of this latter with radical evil. As a consequence, the culmination of the religious critique of Hegel is not in Schopenhauer but in Kierkegaard; and this was the reason Schopenhauer almost disappeared from the philosophical literature at the time of the Kierkegaard renaissance. Schopenhauer became the philosopher “who wants to live on good terms with his pessimism,” a typically non-existential thinker. I regard this criticism as fundamentally

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unjust: Schopenhauer’s anti-Hegelian critique consciously intends to be a critique within rationalism, understood as exclusion of the supernatural, which consistently ends in atheism due to its religious character. But in its continuation the atheistic moment and the religious moment (which is actually properly mystical but completely different from Kierkegaard’s religiosity) split apart in a process entirely similar to that leading to the division between the Hegelian right and left. On the one side there is religious pessimism, which continues with a more and more spiritualistic tone (A. Spir, E. von Hartmann, P. Martinetti); on the other, Nietzsche. If we want to develop the parallel further, we must recognize – against Löwith’s thesis, which unifies all thought from Hegel to Nietzsche in a single process, with the obvious and consequent reduction of Schopenhauer’s place to a minimum – a symmetric pattern in  the opposition between the lines Hegel-Feuerbach-Marx and Schopenhauer-von Hartmann-Nietzsche. This interpretation is necessary if we consider (to cite a forgotten document) the opposition and symmetry of von Hartmann’s Religion of the Future to Feuerbach’s Principles of a Religion of the Future. This topic would well deserve a study. As for Comte, I certainly do not intend to deny that he strove to realize a humanity without any trace of God. Moreover, his case seems to contradict the idea that the origins of atheism lie in metaphysical rationalism. But coming up with a program is one thing, realizing it another. So, here one might raise the question whether the conclusion of French positivism should not be found in Bergson, whose process of thought, which started from a critique of Spencer, ends precisely with a critique of the kind of “closed religion” of which Comte had been the theoretician.27 By a process that takes place completely inside positivism as its self-criticism, and that is hard to understand and to situate historically precisely to the extent that all other directions of thought are initially ignored (classical philosophers, if anything, are discovered at the end), Bergson arrives at a critique of the original Comtian foundation. This idea is not paradoxical if we keep in mind that the same atmosphere,

27 Regarding the character, pushed to the extreme, of being a “closed religion” of Comte’s religion of humanity, see the very beautiful pages by Fr De Lubac in The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995). This is why the intensity of his aversion to Christianity is equal to that of his sympathy for Catholicism. In a synthetic formula, we might say that for Comte positivism makes possible the definitive dissociation of Catholicism and Christianity, in favour of the former.

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the pre-positivism of the Ideologues, prepared the philosophies of Maine de Biran and Comte. Gouhier writes: “despite their different interior dispositions and their divergent journeys, and without attenuating what separates an ‘amateur’ of the end of the eighteenth century from a student of the polytechnic school at the beginning of the nineteenth, the founder of psychology does belong to the same family as the founder of sociology. They both start from the question: how can we make knowledge of man positive? They both raise it because they subordinate the answer to a way of life. They both know that the advent of the science of man is exceptionally important; it makes metaphysics positive, says the former, it enables us to found positive philosophy, says the latter.”28 The analogies between de Biran and Bergson have been pointed out often; cannot we say that the philosophy of the latter marks the victory, within French positivism, of de Biran over Comte? As for existentialist atheism, it takes two forms: the existentialism in the Hegelian left and the existentialism in contemporary French philosophy. Regarding Nietzsche, I think that his thought is better described as “tragic” atheism. Speaking of existentialism in the Hegelian left, people often mention Feuerbach; however, the term that best fits his thought is “humanism.” The true existentialist atheist of that period is the critic of Feuerbach’s “generic Humanity” in the name of the Unique Individual – that is, Max Stirner. Henri Arvon deserves credit for having highlighted the importance of this generally ignored and despised philosopher.29 He is described either as a caricature of Fichte, 28 H. Gouhier, Les conversions de Maine de Biran (Paris: Vrin, 1948), 11. See also “Maine de Biran and Bergson,” in Etudes Bergsoniennes (1948). After all, it is well known that the formula “spiritualistic positivism” was coined by Ravaisson in reference to the philosophy of Maine de Biran. 29 H. Arvon, Aux sources de l’existentialisme, Max Stirner (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). This book expands, with regard to Stirner, the extremely effective précis L’anarchisme (Paris: PUF, 1954). It continues in Ludwig Feuerbach: La transformation du sacré (Paris: PUF, 1957), a book that, as a result of having studied in depth Feuerbach’s disciple/adversary Stirner, lets us establish Feuerbach’s place in the history of philosophy in a form that I am inclined to call definitive. As for the essay on anarchism, even though it appeared in the apparently popularizing series Que sais-je?, it seems to me that it is today the obligatory starting point for any serious study of anarchic thought. He draws well the Hegel-Feuerbach-Stirner-Bakunin line, which in his judgment is no less legitimate than the Hegel-Marx line. My opinion on the topic, however, is that they are two communicating lines, of which the second is necessarily victorious; just as we can view Marx as the one who surpasses Stirner, so we must

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according to whom the I opposes itself not to the non-I but to other I’s; or a peculiar precursor of Nietzsche in a style of petit-bourgeois mediocrity; or bundled together with Proudhon and Bakunin, neglecting the differences; or even viewed as a precursor of anarchic terrorism – to the point of making him the true initiator of atheistic existentialism. Actually, I am inclined to make an even stronger claim: he is the only example of consistent atheistic existentialism. In order to grasp his significance, we must reflect upon his decisive presence in the writings in which Marx, once and for all, nailed down his philosophy – The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. Not coincidentally, in fact, the first of them features Stirner as the main adversary. Arvon writes correctly: “praxis, man’s practical activity that exerts itself on a given social environment and becomes, in lieu of conscience, the effective negativity thanks to which social alienation is eliminated … is presented as the surpassing of mechanistic materialism and dialectic Idealism. It reconciles into a superior unity materialist sensualism and Idealist activity. Marx entrusts to Feuerbach’s Man the function of creator that Stirner had reserved for Consciousness. Thereby praxis seems to be the result … of the polemics between Stirner and Marx. It is through it that Marx ends the antinomy between Feuerbach’s humanism and

recognize Lenin, when we try to define his philosophical originality, as the one who surpasses Bakunin. A deeper study of this last point would be called for because it would allow the most rigorous definition of the opposition between Social Democracy and Communism. From a theoretical standpoint, the former is the development of Marx against Bakunin; the latter is the affirmation of Marx after Bakunin, where the thought of Bakunin can be defined in terms of the identification of the Hegelian motif of the antithesis as the theoretical premise of revolutionary thought. I do not need to say how important a rigorous treatment of this topic would be for an ideological clarification of contemporary politics. In the book on Stirner, pages 85–7, devoted to his critique of Proudhon, are very important, although I am not sure that Arvon grasps their exceptional importance. What Stirner, like Edgar Bauer, fights in Proudhon is the endurance of the religious illusion under the guise of worshipping absolute justice  – that is, the fact that Proudhon did not partake of the critique of ethics developed by the Hegelian left. In my judgment, this is what enables us to understand Renouvier’s thought, from the Science de la morale of 1865 onward, as the continuation of anti-Hegelian Proudhonism, which had necessarily to take, from 1882 to 1903, the form of a heretic rediscovery of “Christian philosophy”; and to establish the very important distinction, in view of what will be said below about the essence of anti-clericalism, between anti-clerical individualism and anarchic individualism.

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Stirner’s Egoism.”30 Within the perspective deriving from Hegelianism, Marx is undoubtedly the winner: within the Hegelian line of descent, atheistic existentialism is just a stage surpassed by Marxist atheism. Hence Stirner, in order to be able to reaffirm himself after Marx, should have shifted his thought in Kierkegaard’s direction, criticizing Hegel’s philosophy of religion for resolving Christianity into the history of the world spirit; he should have jumped from the Hegelian left to Kierkegaard’s type of anti-Hegelianism. So far, Martin Buber has been the only one who has pointed this out explicitly.31 I would like to add that Stirner’s thought is amenable to meeting Kierkegaard’s thought in its Shestovian development; indeed, what is Shestov’s philosophy if not the rediscovery of the biblical God through revolt – in the individualistic and anarchic sense – carried to the extreme, against evidence and necessity, beyond ethics? I will discuss later how important this parallel can be. The fact that, within the Hegelian left, atheistic existentialism ends up being just a stage surpassed by Marxist atheism is exceptionally important in order to evaluate recent atheistic existentialism. It had to realize itself, for reasons that would take too long to investigate now, in French thought (indeed, Heidegger’s thought is not atheistic, or at least only becomes atheistic in its unnecessary Sartrian extension). It is actually the precise confirmation of that fact, in the sense that it cannot surpass, as atheism, Marxism, and it does not contain, in its regard, any higher critical insight. Indeed, observe the following: Sartre’s old essay (I will restrict myself here to considering his case among all existential atheists, as the most significant) on La Liberté Cartesienne is still exemplary in order to define the nature of his thought.32 We can recognize in Descartes’s theory of divine freedom the most religious aspect of his thought, 30 Arvon, Aux sources, 162. I take the liberty to remark that already in my 1946 essay, pages 194–5, I advanced an extremely similar thesis, even though at that time I did not know Stirner directly and I did not understand clearly that, simply from the logical standpoint, Marx could be aware only of the possibility of the atheistic form of existentialism. To Marx, the reaffirmation of Hegel appeared necessary in order to prevent humanism – as it moved on after the failure of the Hegelian form of reconciliation with reality – from decaying inevitably into a theologization of the individual. 31 M. Buber, Dialogisches Leben (Zürich: Mueller, 1947), 195–6 and 202–3. 32 [TN] In Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 314–27, translated as “Cartesian Freedom” in Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 181–97.

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provided that we accept the openness to the supernatural proper to Cartesianism; provided, in other words, that we give up the picture of Descartes’s’ “rationalism.” In this sense I remarked (pages 368ff) that Pascal’s philosophy represents precisely Cartesianism rethought from the perspective of divine freedom as its essential thesis, which coincides with Cartesianism completely freed from its presupposed Molinism and from its only rationalist moment, the ontological argument. But let us accept, instead, the critique of the supernatural developed by German philosophy, in its most radical immanentist form, all the way to the idea that “sin is having been born.”33 Then, divine creative freedom will be attributed to man; that is, we will have Pascal’s exact opposite. Inserting freedom, now, into a radically atheistic conception – in which it is no longer true that human will is free with respect to finite goods because it is necessarily moved by the supreme good –means talking about nonfinalized freedom, which for man means, consistently, a condemnation. It means talking about freedom that can only express itself as destructive freedom,34 which, therefore, cannot but welcome revolutionary thought 33 On this point, see J. Maritain, La philosophie morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 471 [TN: Moral Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 380]. 34 This happens because in French thought freedom is freedom to say no; however, in Cartesian thought it is understood as the possibility to free oneself from error, thus presupposing an order of truth, whether created or not. When this order is explicitly rejected, the words “truth” and “order” lose their meaning. What is commonly called Sartre’s “moralism” – meaning the transition from Heidegger’s essentially metaphysical existentialism to an essentially moral one – is actually a cover for this position. Father Fabro’s remarks (“Osservazioni critiche,” 216–17) on the effective annihilation of freedom in atheistic existentialism are very important: “the error of all forms of atheism lies in blocking or inverting freedom, which in the end is reduced to necessity, that is, to nothing … Indeed, for atheistic existentialism to be is to choose, but to choose to be what one is, to choose not to choose in other words, because if man were to choose something beyond himself and if his choosing were conditioned by something different from himself, it would no longer be choosing … It is certain, anyway, that real man, the individual who is the first subject of being, does not choose and therefore is not free.” In these considerations I find a confirmation of my view about the incomparable value of Descartes’s intuition of the link between divine creation and the affirmation of the freedom of the individual, or of his reality, which are one and the same; this in the sense (essay VII) of political freedom itself. The pattern of identifying freedom and necessity is actually ineliminable from the form of thought that concludes with atheism. If, then, we try to place Sartre in the history of philosophy, I think the best way would be to see him as the rigorous development of the atheistic temptation that Lequier rejected, although without

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in its fully elaborated form (i.e., Marxism). Hence, Sartre’s thesis that Marxism is insuperable.35 Having established this, we must recognize in his philosophy a decadentist version of Marxism; curiously, this progressive philosophy is the only one in which existentialism and decadentism coincide. Indeed, from the historical standpoint he inverts Marx’s problem: whereas Marx meant to graft the French revolutionary spirit onto the trunk of German philosophy, Sartre, on the contrary, uses German philosophy to make the French philosophy of freedom atheistic, eroding it from within; his decadentist character can be seen exactly in the replacement of the Marxist process of synthesis with that of erosion. Therefore, his thought amounts to a form Cartesianism, freed of the ontological argument and the openness to the supernatural, which at the same time rejects the Idealist interpretation. Thus, it is the inverse of the religious philosophy of existence that had prevailed in France in the 1930s. Since the inversion I described is the primary and fundamental feature of his thought, it is no wonder that he must keep subordinating Marxism to existentialism, even after having declared, in his latest writings, that Marxism is insuperable. Even though people talk a lot about a first and a last Sartre, no real process of development can be traced in his philosophy. On the other hand, in a philosophy that intends to be action, evaluating the behaviour it imposes matters more than evaluating the theoretical expression. And it is here that his failure to surpass, and his actual subordination to, Marxism manifests itself because to what else did his philosophy lead, if not to the fully realized type of the “fellow traveller”? Note that a “fellow traveller” is given the task of talking to milieux that are thought to be out of Marxism’s direct reach. In Sartre’s

being able to overcome it philosophically. In fact, it is certainly not coincidental that Sartre could not help renewing exactly, as the overall formula of his philosophy, Lequier’s chosen motto “faire et en faisant se faire,” possibly without an initial conscious reference. 35 This is the thesis of Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) [TN: Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Verso, 2004)]. However, a very sharp political critic, who is also a philosopher, Aimé Patri, could write perfectly that Sartre did not sacrifice anything from his previous thought in favour of the “insuperable philosophy” and that his position boils down to subordinating what he calls Marxism to what he regards as existentialism. This thesis could only be completely shared by a Marxist author, who otherwise is very benevolent in his overall assessment of Sartre, A. Schaff  – see La filosofia dell’uomo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1963), 23–47.

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case this is the bourgeoisie, and he did not have, nor could he have had, any other audience. This does not take away his historical importance, above all as a “case.” Generally, the French philosophy of freedom tended to retreat into a closed conservative academic position: hence the very young Mounier’s idea, shortly after 1930, of a “non-academic and nonuniversity-based philosophy,” centred around the consideration of the crisis. Paradoxically this philosophy came to be realized, starting from the very same terms in which Mounier had proposed it, by the atheist Sartre, while the “personalist” exertions by the Catholic Mounier turned out to be in vain from the strictly philosophical standpoint: they were not even germs that could be developed. The question was indeed the same: to address the hope of the young intellectuals after 1935 – those whose background was not Idealist and did not lean towards the new positivism – to reconcile Kierkegaard and Marx and to give existential thought a political expression. It is undeniable now that this hope, whose illusory character ought to be clarified, found in Sartre its insuperable expression and its defeat. Besides, Marxism does not regard French philosophy, in the aspect whereby it is irreducible to German philosophy and is not surpassed by it, as one of the positions it can sublate, because Marxism accepts the Hegelian historical perspective, albeit upending its scale of values. This is why Marxism needs Sartre as an auxiliary in order to advance its polemic in France.36 A few more words on the moral aspect of atheism: I defined it (page 299) as the will to be consistent with the original option of rationalism, understood as rejection without proofs of the status naturae lapsae. And, as a matter of fact, the quest for total consistency between thought and life defines the question that leads to the transition from Hegel to Marx, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and also, in a certain sense, from Heidegger to Sartre.37 However, can we conclude from this 36 In other words, whereas in Italy Marxist thought has been able to establish a bridge with tradition through Gramsci’s work, abiding by Marxist orthodoxy, in France this could only happen in the work of somebody who must remain a fellow traveller, like – precisely – Sartre. 37 In fact the relationship is quite different because it is from the start a transposition of Heidegger’s thought into French philosophy; hence, the insuppressible heterogeneity, which earlier motivated me to say that Sartre’s philosophy, exactly because it is a transposition, is not amenable in any way to be presented as a necessary continuation of Heidegger’s novelty. Quoting again Fr Fabro (211–12), I will say that the true conclusion of Sartre’s original thought should have been suicide, even if he “seems to

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that atheism is tied to the idea of “autonomous morals,” made most radical, as we often hear people say? Few people know that a definitive study of the concept of autonomous morals has been carried out, here in Italy, by a thinker who always had few readers, and has even fewer now, I believe, even though he has been the subject of valuable scholarship: Erminio Juvalta. His work,38 in which we must also recognize one of the greatest expressions of the liberal conscience of the initial decades of our century, deserves to be included among the classics of moral philosophy as the ultimate clarification of an essence. It is not important now to determine whether this clarification leads also to a self-criticism; whether, after admitting the plurality of ethical criteria – an admission that presents itself to it as necessary – it moves inevitably, against its author’s intention (which may explain his almost complete silence during the last fifteen years of his life, 1919–34), towards insuperable skepticism – that is, to say it all, towards ethical nihilism;39 and whether it does not require, in order to be continued, the development of a relationship between metaphysics and morals different from the one feel very comfortable in this world”; that is, his political philosophy is actually a “vital,” and not moral, refusal of suicide. Therefore, I will also say that he has come close to greatness only in one book, his first novel, La nausée, compared to which all his later production is a decline. 38 All his essential writings have been collected by Ludovico Geymonat in I limiti del razionalismo etico (Turin: Einaudi, 1945). 39 I use this expression in Strauss’s sense, Diritto naturale e storia (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1957) [TN: Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)], mentally substituting “ethics” for “natural right.” Of course, nobody was more averse to ethical nihilism than Juvalta; but this is precisely what makes his research valuable, that he pushed the analysis of autonomous morals to its extreme consequences, until he ran into a contradiction from which he could not escape except by discovering an idea of metaphysics different from the one he had met during his formation, which truly did not lend itself to provide a foundation for ethics. Mazzantini describes very well the most serious oscillation of Juvalta’s thought: “on the one hand he seems to affirm … that the intrinsic value of every person and his/her moral evaluations is and must be recognized by every other person. But on the other hand … he also seems to affirm that the evaluations of those who do not recognize the intrinsic value of that just moral regime can be genuinely moral, too” (from the entry “Juvalta” in Enciclopedia Filosofica [Milan: Bompiani, 1957–58]). Here we must observe that the first affirmation is what moves ab initio Juvalta’s thought, and the second thesis … is the result of his process of thought. As for the relation between Renouvier and Juvalta, it had already been recognized, albeit not in the precise sense in which it is described here, by L. Limentani, I presupposti formali dell’indagine etica (Genoa: Formiggini, 1913).

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Juvalta had rightly criticized.40 Juvalta’s moral philosophy can be described (even though he does not explicitly use this formula,41 which nonetheless constantly underpins his thought) as an attempt developed to the extreme consequences to radically separate value and force. To

40 He criticizes the metaphysical foundation of morals (I limiti, 243–5) in Rosmini’s form, understood as the idea of conforming to a cosmic order; in this sense his critique is definitive and still very relevant. However, is there not a deeper Rosmini, that of “moral being,” which is being rediscovered today? An extremely interesting topic would be the study of Blondel’s entire thought as a search for the authentic relationship between metaphysics and morals, after having granted Juvalta’s objections in their full power (whose thought Blondel did not know; but let us not forget his close ties to Rauh, whose investigations are strikingly similar to Juvalta’s). This proposal seems to me what the recent book by Claude Tresmontant, which is much superior to previous works on the subject, Introduction à la métaphisique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), leads to. I take the liberty to transcribe, because of their importance, the following lines: “the Normative that Blondel regarded as necessary for an integral ontology, the norm whose necessity and meaning he discussed in the work of his that he considered the most original, L’etre et les êtres, not only belong in the spirit and in the  tradition of St Thomas but, we can rightly say, touches the deepest aspect of the Thomist doctrine of the law. Indeed, Blondel’s effort, like St Thomas’s, has been to relink ethics to ontology. Natural and divine law are not the expression of an extrinsic and juridical diktat, more or less arbitrary, imposed by a God jealous of our realization, who strives to limit our rights and frustrate our desires. Natural law and divine law are not tyrannical mutilations imposed by an emasculating God; nor is the moral law, though, the inexplicable demand imposed on us by ‘practical reason’ without ontological justification. The Norm is the expression of a demand inscribed in being, and this norm inscribed in objective reality is not mutilating but, on the contrary, creative, striving towards more-being” (318). Here we see the correct way to pose the question of reconciling Blondel and St Thomas, and that of Blondel’s thought as a road to rediscover the authentic sense of Thomism; in fact, it is well known that this conciliation was Blondel’s fundamental problem in his last period. As a sign of the relevance both of Juvalta’s thought and of Blondel’s question, we can cite Pietro Piovani’s remarkable book Giusnaturalismo ed etica moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1961): “man makes himself man … not by letting himself be included inside the authoritarian circle of a truth that is objectively exterior to him, but … by activating the decisive responsibilities … of moral creation, so that he can call himself adiutor Dei” (6). But does such cosmologism, which Piovani rightly rejects, truly belong to the best natural law tradition, in its Catholic understanding? On this, see the astute article by Fr Salvatore Lener on “Padre Taparelli e l’antigiusnaturalismo contemporaneo,” in Miscellanea Taparelli, Analecta Gregoriana (1963), in which he remarks that the “fact of nature” from which Taparelli starts coincides with “that insuppressible need for normativity which the human individual bears within himself as the mark of his humanity,” which Piovani correctly affirms. 41 Sometimes he comes close, though. See, for instance, the proposition: “reality can be interpreted as a system of forces and as a system of values” (I limiti, 245).

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be moral means giving up the criterion of siding with the strong, regardless of whom we regard as “strong.” But this is expressed philosophically in the negation (as a pseudo-problem) of the search for the “foundation” of morality as a force on which morality needs to rely. Thus, he sharply distinguishes morality from science, sociology, history, metaphysics, religion; his criticisms of sociologism and of the ethics of the “direction of history” seem definitive to me,42 and very valid still today for a critique of most of contemporary moral theory. Thus, it is a humanism, but entirely different from that of Feuerbach and, therefore, not surpassable by Marxism; and since in the 1800s there were, rigorously speaking, only two forms of humanism, Feuerbach’s left Hegelian one and Renouvier’s anti-Hegelian one, I incline to assign his work to the ideal descent of the latter.43 However, whereas the self-justification44 of moral values affirms that “no moral evaluation can be derived from any religious value unless it is already explicitly or implicitly contained in it” – that is, unless there is a moral evaluation built in the religious value whose validity subsists or would subsist also outside of it – it does not rule out at all the religious evaluation but actually establishes its autonomy with respect to the moral one. And by removing any scientistic objection – because the analysis of morality makes manifest the reality of an area of values about which science cannot make any pronouncements – it guarantees the right to believe and the possibility of hope,45 even though it rules out all proofs. 42 It seems to me that Juvalta’s objection (I limiti, 241–2) to the reduction of ethics to sociology, which today has come back in fashion, still has decisive value. Note that this is even more important because the ethical-political problem – of preserving the validity of morals in a society in which its association with religious beliefs had been shaken – was his starting point as well as Durkheim’s. We ought not to forget, when considering this attempt typical of those distant decades, how decisive was the critical position of the almost unknown Juvalta (for his critique of the foundation of morals in history, see 259–63) compared to that of the famous Durkheim. 43 This is why in my work Giulio Lequier e il momento tragico della filosofia francese (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1963) I proposed the idea that Renouvier’s philosophy provides the general context within which one can study the philosophies of Juvalta, Martinetti, and Rensi, which are at same time similar and far from each other. 44 [TN] Autassia in the original. 45 In this sense, we can recognize the development of his religious thought in Mazzantini’s first book, La speranza dell’immortalità (Turin: Paravia, 1923), which was prefaced by none other than Juvalta. In I Limiti it is very important to consider page 254, where Juvalta makes precise his dissent with Høffding’s thesis, which at that time was very popular, that the essential kernel of religion is the belief in the conservation

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Finally, let us tackle another possible objection that seems particularly powerful because it comes from the common opinion rather than from the disquisitions of scholars. I said that the transition to postulatory atheism characterizes our century. But Scheler wrote about it already in 1926, highlighting in particular Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethics. Time flows quickly, and truly Hartmann’s fortunes cannot be said to have improved over the last decades. Almost forty years have gone by, more packed with events than any other epoch in world history: Nazism, world war, the atomic bomb, a completely new strategic situation, the end of European primacy, colossal industrial growth, and so on. Just considering the period from 1945 to today, we have seen enormous progress in the sciences and the obliteration of metaphysics. Moreover, in philosophy the twentieth century has been the age of the neo’s: neo-Hegelianism, renewed philosophy of existence, neo-Thomism, neo-criticism, neospiritualism, even neo-Marxism and neo-positivism. Philosophical originality seems extinguished, does it not? Also, metaphysical ideas of values, because Juvalta’s critique is motivated by the need to guarantee the autonomy of religion with respect to morality, which is correlative to the thesis of the autonomy of morals. Juvalta’s constant presence in the thought of Mazzantini, who recognized him as his main teacher, could be studied also in the treatment of metaphysical-theological themes: both regarding the relationship between God and necessary truths – which he conceives neither as arbitrary creations nor as binding norms, which burden the divine Being as an obligation – and the correlative thesis of the persuasive (before being necessitating) character of evidence. In Guido Calogero’s thought one could discern a rediscovery of Juvalta’s themes after Gentile; even though of course the secularist bent is much stronger because of his neo-Hegelian background, in which atheism and humanism are always linked. In this regard, one should look at the many sentences with a Feuerbachian flavour in  Scuola dell’uomo (Florence: Sansoni, 1939) as a confirmation of the necessary encounter, after Actualism, between the morality of autonomous ethics and the rediscovery of the Hegelian left along Feuerbach’s line. Regarding the connection between autonomous morality and atheism in the thought of Nicolai Hartmann, we must consider that it takes place starting from essentially metaphysical considerations (the antithesis between God’s existence and man’s freedom; the antithesis between the religious idea of sin and the idea of moral guilt), which renew the themes that had characterized the Hegelian left. The interest, by now very remote, in his ethical atheism was due precisely to this renewal, in years when that line had been forgotten. Against the negations of religion in the name of morality, art, and science, see the very important remarks by Augusto Guzzo in “La Religione,” Memorie dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 4a no. 6 (1963–64), 141ff.

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thrived in the interwar period: Does that not raise suspicion about their nature, in the sense, if not of complicity with that time’s politics (it matters little whether unaware), at least of correspondence to it in the same unfortunate epoch? Thus, the situation at the beginnings of positivism repeats itself, but much more radically. To use Kant’s starting point as a reference, by now two of his certainties seem to have become unintelligible: the aspiration to metaphysics and the moral law. Full positivism, then; not even neo-positivism any longer, which by fighting other philosophies somehow acknowledged them, and by ­presenting itself as a methodology accepted the idea of philosophy professed by some of them. Instead, a complete rejection of philosophy; we no longer need to discuss it, just like we no longer discuss astrology. Moreover, those who still practise philosophy as a profession seek a justification by tethering their thought to the new psychology, or to the new physics, or to literary forms that find an audience to the extent that they are linked with psychoanalysis – “my philosophy is the only one that can account for, and so on,” which is a slightly comical spectacle. Even today’s fashionable theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, knew a lot about science and little about philosophy. So, the type of atheism that seems prevalent today is based, in the West, on science in the form of psychoanalysis – interpreted as rejecting any philosophy that claims to stand next to it as autonomous, and as directing pedagogy – and, in the East, on science in the form of scientistic Soviet dialectical materialism. Nor is there any point in repeating, breaking up the word, that the a-theism of science is methodological. If only science exists, atheism stops being methodological. Now, consider: psychoanalysis, in its Freudian form, since it does not admit next to itself an autonomous philosophy, does indeed contain an apparent proof of the non-existence of God. It can be summarized as follows: man needs God, “therefore” God does not exist. An affirmation that cannot be verified sensorially is proven to be illusory by revealing the need that caused it. By liberating people from delusions and from the imbalances they cause, psychoanalysis claims to attain what atheistic philosophies aspired to without being able to achieve, the reconciliation of man with himself via the recognition of his normality; by effectively dissolving every shadow of sin as well as every aggressive instinct, it seems able to provide what earlier forms of atheism could not achieve, precisely because they presented themselves as philosophies: happiness and peace. Psychoanalytic education suppresses at long last the need for

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“ethics” and redeems the word “happiness,” which for so long had raised the suspicions of moralists. But its proof of the non-existence of God is patently dogmatic. It is certainly less valid than the opposite argument: that a universal aspiration that troubles man cannot be illusory. Therefore, one will need to prove that this aspiration is not universal, and to do so one will need to have recourse to sociology: to the plurality of ethical positions and religious positions, and their connection to various social orders. But no sociology of religion can justify the transition to a sociological interpretation of religion. That requires that sociology change into sociologism, and sociologism, as we shall see, is nothing but Marxism’s objectivized form. Scientific atheism, that is, subsists only by a surreptitious recourse to philosophical atheism; and to the form of philosophical atheism that for decades now has been conditioning, at first obscurely and then openly, all the transformations in the philosophical, moral, religious, aesthetic perspectives of today’s world.46 It will be a matter of seeing, later on, whether this form of atheism, when it intends to reach a rigorous critical formulation, turns out to be postulatory or not; whether or not it must take the form of the pari.

2. Atheism, Anti-Clericalism, Heresy In order to define the essence of atheism, we need to isolate it from other essences that seem similar. This is why I devoted pages 273–8 to show that atheism and anti-clericalism are totally heterogeneous. Rereading them, I felt I had to expand them, both because the topic is not very familiar (in fact, I did not find any literature about it),47 and because I intend to make the discussion more precise with an important

46 Ugo Spirito, as far as I can see, is the only one among non-Marxist Italian philosophers (besides me and my fraternal friend, Felice Balbo, who died so prematurely not long ago) who has explicitly said so. 47 Indeed, the very interesting and well-documented article by R. Berardi, “Clericale e clericalismo negli ultimi cento anni,” Il Mulino no. 94 (1960), does not mention any philosophical research on the subject. Therefore, the term “anti-­ clericalism” has been reduced, in the proper sense, to mean “opposing any confusion of the respective jurisdictions of the Church and the State,” and in a generic sense to mean anti-Catholicism or irreligiosity of any kind. We had to wait until 1950 for Migliorini to point out (in the appendix to Panzini’s Dizionario moderno, 9th ed.

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addition about the necessary, but altogether different, ways in which atheism and anti-clericalism meet heresy and relate to it. Apparently, the theme is not even deserving of consideration: What could be more clear than the fact that atheism and anti-clericalism denote different realities? Moreover, it seems that one can speak of anti-clericalism only referring to the adjective, by the very fact that it indicates a negation; it seems, therefore, that there is no basis for an investigation of the essence of anti-clericalism. But this consideration is contradicted by the fact that today there is a widespread thesis that claims that atheism is simply anti-clericalism made most radical, to the point that its polemic does not target only certain temporal aspects of the behaviour of the Church but the Church and theology themselves.48 The reasoning, essentially, is this: there is a way of understanding religion as “closed” religion (in Bergson’s sense); since it is a constant and ultimately ineliminable attitude, the Church needs a perpetual reform movement, that is, a restoration of the authentic meaning of religion (practised by her saints). Recent Catholic theologians have discerned the true and false meanings of this reform. However, when the closed type of religion prevails, and religion becomes so welded to a certain social order that it seems to be one of its organs (as allegedly happened in the age of the Counter-Reformation), then there is anti-clericalism, which initially expresses itself as natural religion. However, this natural religion has accompanied the formation and the dominance of the bourgeois class. When an agreement is established between the Church and the new dominant class, because of the conservative character of closed religion, anti-clericalism takes the form of anti-theism, which when it tries to justify itself theoretically presents itself as atheism. But such atheism, the extreme form of “resentment against the Christian world,” is in reality a superstructure of the proletarian movement; the only way to overcome it is by moving to “open” religion.

[1960], 812) a broader use of the term “clericalism” to indicate “any kind of organized dogmatism.” We are already on the road leading to the present investigation, but the need to pose the question philosophically has not yet been perceived. 48 In the book by the Catholic theologian Marcel Reding, Der politische Atheismus (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1958) – which is rigorously developed, although in my view completely mistaken due to the way in which the problem is initially posed – we can see the most consistent application of this thesis to the assessment of Marxism.

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The quickest survey is sufficient to realize that this type of reasoning underpins not only the greater part of the evaluations in the Catholic press but also the philosophical, theological, historical, philological studies in which it is elaborated and documented in reference to various topics. In its academic formulations it very often presents itself in the customary way, as a conclusion that is in fact the presupposition. It is the reduction of atheism to “practical atheism,” which must be recognized (essays V and VII) as the first premise of Catholic progressivism or, more precisely, of today’s neo-modernism. It is important to observe that this thesis is irrefutable if atheism is viewed essentially as a practical attitude and if in a religious philosophy one attenuates the theme of sin.49 The most extreme case of this attenuation is Bergsonism,50 whose penetration into Catholic thought, especially in France, is still huge even today. In fact, nothing could be clearer than this: if one does not take into account the particular interpretation of sin that marks atheism from the start, atheism and extreme anti-clericalism cannot, as essences, but coincide. My thesis is entirely different: anti-clericalism is indeed a process that leads to anti-theism in Proudhon before he starts his polemic against Marx. However, after the appearance of the secular philosophies of history, and of the forms of worldly religion that proceed from them, a broadening of perspective takes place in anti-clericalism, whereby it takes the form of a reaction against any position of thought that engenders, as a practical consequence, the secular dominance of a priestly caste (tied, of course, to other worldly interests), no matter how it presents and establishes itself – against any position that thereby becomes in history the instrument of the will to power of this caste. Therefore, it is amenable to the following definition: having been originally a moral reaction by the individual against the worldly power of the Church, it becomes, after the philosophy of history, the antithesis, in the name of ethics, to the spirit of reconciliation with the reality of this world; this spirit of reconciliation dissimulates a will to power that, in order to realize itself, must give rise to an organization

49 The correlation between these two motifs, which is actually implicit in what I have already written, would deserve to be clarified with a full treatment. 50 The typical character of Bergsonian religion is that of being Christianity without sin. Hence we understand its continuity with Biranism (see page 297n37) as the development of the religious aspect of Rousseau’s thought, although in a different sense than Kant’s, because the anti-supernatural rationalist presupposition is absent.

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whose authority needs to take a sacred character, either as the custodian of the deposit of a supernatural Revelation or as the representative of Progress, Evolution, Science, History, Humanity, the Nation, and so on. Being a refusal to reconcile with worldly reality, it is a form of pessimism; but pessimism in the name of morality, which leads to the idea of morality as the revelation of an objective transcendent order, and historically to the mutual opposition of Kant and Hegel; and thus to a form of thought that is a commentary on Kant’s religious philosophy, where Kant’s thought is used to make an absolute distinction between Christianity and Catholicism, keeping the former.51 This definition can be verified historically by examining the two philosophers who are most significant for the study of anti-clericalism as an essence, Renouvier and Martinetti. There is nothing strange about the fact that, as a result, one needs to focus on a relatively short historical period, if we reflect that the sharp break I described could only take place after the philosophy of history reached its climax, bringing about positions of thought that were defeated by its descendant, which often styles itself as a rebel – historicism; that, therefore, anti-clericalism as a substantive is foreign to the cultural atmosphere in which we live now. Nor is there anything strange about the fact that one needs to highlight two philosophers who are usually regarded as “minor” (i.e., as nonclassic, not authors who must be obligatorily read but, at the same time, not mere philosophy professors); their “minor” character is due only to the manifest failure of their research, namely, the assumption of Kant’s philosophy as the foundation not only of a reform of existing theologies but also of a new religion oriented towards transcendence; however, the lessons we can draw from this failure are extremely important for the philosophy of religion. Regarding Renouvier, we must look at his philosophy from the angle of the singular feature that radically distinguishes it from the French spiritualists of Biranian descent: it represents the self-criticism of SaintSimonism, prompted by the ever stronger influence of the “unknown philosopher” whose posthumous works Renouvier published, Jules Lequier. If one looks at it from this angle, his very long philosophical activity assumes exceptional importance because it is the most precious document to study the moral consciousness of the 1800s, the daughter

51 The exemplary expression of this position is Martinetti’s Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo (1934).

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of Rousseau and Kant, in its resistance to the philosophy of history. In this resistance we see in outline the beginnings of new philosophical essences: a humanism that is not that of the Hegelian left, the autonomous morality associated with this humanism, a pragmatism that is not the Marxist one, personalism, and at the same time the rediscovery of Christianity, when rational religion encounters pessimism and heresy. This self-criticism of the Saint-Simonian form of the philosophy of history is also, effectively, the systematic continuation of Proudhon as the anti-Marx – that is, of the Proudhon who extended the target of his polemic to the philosophy of history, in the name of “Justice” and the “individual.” This led Renouvier to understand anti-clericalism as radical individualism (its metaphysical expression was La nouvelle monadologie, i.e., a remake of Leibniz’s monadology, separated from any element that might prepare a Hegelian continuation and highlighting its connection with anti-Spinozian Cartesianism), an individualism that separates itself entirely both from the individualism of religious existentialism (because there is no critique of anti-supernaturalist rationalism) and from philosophical anarchism (because this latter had risen on the Hegelian horizon). The unique feature, which is extremely important for a phenomenology of anti-clericalism, is that in the last phase of his thought he rediscovers a Christian, albeit heretical, philosophy by deepening, not by denying, anti-clericalism. There is a legacy from Renouvier to Martinetti that nobody has ever mentioned, which, however, Martinetti recognized, I believe, in his final years (normally, in fact, Renouvier was considered a precursor of Pragmatism, or a chaotic philosopher with mathematical interests, and his religious philosophy of the final twenty years was regarded as a phenomenon of senility rather than as the greatest document of the struggle, in the secular camp, of ethics against the philosophy of history).52 52 In the last issue of Rivista di Filosofia that he edited personally (April–June 1940), his essay “La rinascita di Schopenhauer” is preceded by a reprint of the first eight pages of Renouvier’s essay “Schopenhauer et la métaphysique du pessimisme” from Année philosophique (1893). In those pages Renouvier sketches a historical picture of European civilization and thought that is exactly the same  – regarding Christianity – that Martinetti develops in Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo. This essay, which probably Martinetti came to know only after writing his book, constitutes the meeting point of the two philosophers. In the same issue of Rivista di Filosofia, his review of A. Tilgher’s La Filosofia di Leopardi (Rome: Edizioni di Religio, 1940) is very interesting. Although he recognizes that Leopardi had a philosophical mind, Martinetti

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I am referring to his last work, Les derniers Entretiens, which, as far as its writing is concerned, is unprecedented in the history of thought: it was dictated over the four days of Renouvier’s perfectly lucid agony to his faithful disciple, and last intimate friend, Louis Prat. It is the sketch of a book he had in mind and was not able to write, “a sort of breviary for intellectuals who have not fallen into atheism and who find the Catholic dogma repugnant.” Thus, it is the breviary of a philosophy that is at the same time a religion, not in the Hegelian sense, though, but rather because philosophy and religion are both answers to the problem of evil, not its justification from the dialectical standpoint. A religion without dogmas, without priests, without a church, but a religion that must promote the elevation of the human person through the awareness that moral consciousness and religious consciousness are inseparable; it is destined to gather together the good wills “of all those who intend to oppose both all clericalisms, whatever they may be, and atheism.”53 What fate awaits this religion-philosophy? Renouvier answers that nothing indicates that it can triumph, and not become for posterity, instead, a mere object of curiosity, because its success is tied to that historically fragile support that is men’s moral consciousness. It is, in the end, a philosophy that does not seek its criterion in the present because it deliberately positions itself out of time by reason of the duality of morality and history, and that has even smaller reasons to hope because the crass disposition to reconcile with the world of phenomena (according to the expression used by Renouvier), with power and with strength, has found its ultimate formulation in the worst of all theodicies – the triumphant idea of Progress. Under this label Renouvier includes all historicisms, of any kind, and also the particular progressivism that today we would call neo-Enlightenment (because it opposes the Romantic type of historicism), of which he had been, many years nonetheless says that he did not cultivate this disposition with any study and, therefore, was not properly a philosopher. These short remarks could be used as a trace for a new study on “Leopardi and Schopenhauer” because, in Leopardi, the mystical motif that instead exists in Schopenhauer is completely lacking, while there is a strong existential sensitivity that prefigures Nietzsche, whose derivation from Schopenhauer Martinetti instead denies. See Schopenhauer, ed. P. Martinetti (Milan: Garzanti, 1942), 65. Martinetti’s (necessary, from his point of view) exclusion from philosophy of Nietzsche, and of existential thought in general, is likely the motivation for the exclusion of Leopardi. 53 C. Renouvier, Les derniers Entretiens (Paris: Vrin, 1930), 105.

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earlier, the first theoretician,54 and the categories that depend on it – “well-being, solidarity, love” (think how successful they are today!) – in place of the idea of justice; and also that particular understanding of laicism that means not the elevation of every layperson to a priest, directly responsible in front of God, but rather the construction of a morality that does not speak of God. Martinetti’s thought is the exact, and insuperable, fulfilment of the project of this new religion. The fact that Renouvier did not enter directly its elaboration makes it more interesting. Today, as a philosopher, Martinetti has been forgotten. By a very strange paradox, he is no longer even viewed as a “minor philosopher” (he, the Schopenauerian!) but as a very diligent “professor of philosophy” or as the late representative of a nineteenth-century mindset completely closed to the thought of the twentieth century – limited, in fact, to the decade 1880–90 (the period of Spir, Fechner, von Hartmann, Lotze), while the next decade saw already the appearance of the lines of thought that would blossom in the twentieth century; as a thinker who did study, yes, Empiriocriticism, but according to an interpretation that pushed it backward, reabsorbing it into the usual Lotzean spiritualism; as the personification of a character that people like to caricature, I am not sure how tastefully – the philosopher who preaches and cares for beautiful souls, far removed from the types prevalent today of the methodologist and the phenomenologist; as an indefatigable reader but entirely devoid of a sense of the historicity of philosophies. Apart from his moral personality, he allegedly belongs to the history of the teaching of philosophy – because he broadened the horizons of Italian culture by imparting to the young a direct knowledge of German thought – but not to the actual history of philosophy. There are various possible reasons for this underestimation. We can think of the fate of the dualist thinkers of the 1930s (e.g., Benda, and in part Rensi and Tilgher, who like him were tied to an interpretation of contemporary history as a rebellion of vitality against reason, which was indeed inadequate). We can think of Croce’s judgment, which, entirely unlike his usual judgments, was certainly not motivated by hostility towards the person but, rather, by a total incompatibility of thought. Because people have never pointed out – and this is an aspect that would

54 On this point, which to me seems unquestionable, see my essay on Lequier.

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deserve careful study – that Croce’s peculiar feature is that of being the only radically immanentist philosopher who nonetheless has as his essential adversaries the same adversaries as Catholicism,55 whereas Martinetti represents exactly the highest degree of aversion to Catholicism in a philosopher of transcendence. We can also think of the fact that he had no continuators, because his disciples (Banfi, Bariè, Padovani) eventually wrote philosophical works in which the features of Martinettism are no longer recognizable – works for which any reference to the thought of the teacher seems at least superfluous, if we consider their objective content and not their genesis. So, Banfi’s thought can be interpreted, in one respect, as a reaffirmation of Martinetti after Gentile, the only possible one in a rigorous sense; but the endpoint was a form of critical rationalism, which left behind the dispute between realism and idealism, and which forced him to abandon Martinetti’s religiosity and to start the process that consistently led him to Marxism. In order to understand the peculiarity of the historical impact of Martinetti’s teaching, we only need to refer to the very different impact of the two other teachers of Italian anti-positivism, Gentile and Varisco. Indeed, we cannot talk about Spirito or Calogero without referring to Gentile, even though they can no longer be called Gentilians; and we cannot talk about Carabellese, Galli, and Castelli without referring to Varisco, even though they can no longer be called Varischians. Conversely, for Martinetti this has not been the case. Finally, the form in which he exposed his religious thought in Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo hurt him. Tackling such a theme meant subjecting himself to the judgment of philologists and historians of religion, and Martinetti definitely was no philologist. The expository form ought to have been completely different in order to match the process of his thought: a book on “Religion according to Kant,” which would also have made explicit the vision of the history of Christianity that becomes necessary based on such a premise, and which cannot be derived at all, like the book might seem to suggest, from the consideration of the historical data.

55 See his radical hostility towards all philosophical forms that have their first roots in any heresy or are related to one: even his return from Hegel to Vico is an abandonment of Hegel’s Protestant aspects. He feels the same hostility towards the philosophies that rely on the idea of homo faber, in the sense that Max Scheler gave to this expression, or towards vitalist irrationalism, or towards both scientistic and postulatory atheism. [TN: this footnote is a long parenthetical statement in the original].

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Certainly, this consideration would be inevitable if his philosophy were just, as people usually think, a mere variation of Spinozian monism and of the consequent process of liberation as annihilation of the individual into the divine unity; if it were just a quest to harmonize Spinoza and Kant, which ultimately can only result in the absorption of Kant into Spinoza. But its meaning is entirely different.56 For the sake of brevity, I will summarize it in the following schematic propositions: 1. From a phenomenological standpoint, his thought is extremely important because it nails down with definitive rigour the essence of philosophical-religious dualism and, thereby, the essence of anti-­ clericalism, understood as rebellion against any reconciliation (out of the will to practical domination) of religion with phenomenic reality. 2. By definitively clarifying the philosophical root of anti-clericalism, it provides the criterion to write its rigorous history. The process of anti-clericalism is circular because, having started from the dualist heresy, it gets back to it through the historical process of natural religion. The key moment of this process is Kant, in whom natural religion takes in the most consistent form the meaning of “pure religion,” separated from all its historic degradations, and in that very act separates itself from optimism. In this sense we see the completely different ways in which atheism and anti-clericalism relate to heresy. Indeed atheism, in the Marxist form, encounters the chiliastic heresy but transmogrifies it into a progressive vision; the encounter with heresy is not its logical development, but a sign of the truth of Marxism, because it signifies its historicist preservation of Christianity.57 Conversely, anti-clericalism is characterized by

56 The obligatory starting point for any in-depth study of his thought is Gioele Solari’s review of Sciacca’s book Martinetti (Brescia: La Scuola, 1943) in Rivista di Filosofia 37 (1946): 80–5. Against the Spinozian interpretation, it says perfectly that “he tried to reduce Spinoza to himself, to the spirit of his own doctrine, not himself and his doctrine to Spinoza.” It emphasizes the dualistic aspect of Martinetti’s thought, from the religious standpoint, and the pluralistic character of his idealism. The parallel Solari makes with Pascal is certainly more questionable; in actuality, Martinetti felt no affinity with him because of the Kantian nature of his criticism. This parallel reflects Solari’s conciliatory spirit, in the highest sense. I would like to describe it as a tendential “ecumenical Catholicism” in the sense of not wanting to leave out any moment of truth. 57 This is why Marxist authors put so much emphasis on Lessing’s thought as the meeting point of the Enlightenment and of Joachimism.

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a backward-moving process, towards the Manichean and Cathar heresies; it does not surpass them, but brings to light their immanent philosophy. Therefore, the radical anti-historicism of anti-clericalism stands in opposition to the radical historicism of atheism in its fullest (Marxist) form. 3. This clarification of the immanent philosophy is a consequence of the typically philosophical character of the gnostic heresy,58 which starts from the denial of creation – hence the themes of absolute transcendence, the divine estrangement from the world, God as saviour and redeemer but not creator – and thus, implicitly, from the denial of miracles in order to save God’s “morality.” According to Martinetti’s unique historical vision, the function of modern philosophy is, in the final analysis, to make explicit what is implicit in the heresies of gnostic descent. 4. Hence his anti-supernaturalism, and thus the unmediated identification of philosophy and religion, since philosophy preserves the aspect of appealing to a transcendent reality. Hence also the impossibility of attributing value in a pragmatic sense to the visible churches, and thus the fullness of anti-clericalism. 5. Obviously, from this perspective the criticism of the church cannot concern only the Catholic Church. The criticism of the Catholic Church is merely one aspect of the criticism of optimism as the will to reconcile with phenomenic reality; since religion is pessimism, such will to reconcile is essentially materialistic and atheistic (what philosophical anticlericalism reproaches the Catholic Church for is its dissimulated atheism). This is why Martinetti’s thought is radically antithetical to the other form in which, after classical German philosophy, philosophy makes itself religion – on the condition, though, of pushing to the extreme not the affirmation of the transcendence of the divine but, rather, atheism – namely, Marxism. In this regard, we should observe the symmetry between these unmediated identifications of philosophy and religion produced (of course in opposite senses) by the

58 On this point see the very notable book by Simone Pètrement, Le dualisme dans l’histoire de la philosophie et des religions (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), which is a companion to her very broad study titled Le dualisme chez Platon, les gnostiques et les manichéens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947). Pètrement does not cite Martinetti, evidently because she does not know him. But the typology of dualistic thought that she draws applies perfectly to his philosophy, thus providing a complete proof that it is an essential document because it expresses insuperably philosophicalreligious dualism.

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prolongation of the new aspect of Hegelianism and the backward looking aspect of Schopenhauerianism. 6. Undoubtedly Martinetti’s dualism is a unique case in the history of modern philosophy. In order to explain it we must start from the fracture of Schopenhauerianism. In its continuation, Schopenhauer’s “religious atheism” splits into two sides, and this break takes place in terms very similar to those of post-Hegelianism: the issue is the quest for complete consistency between life and thought, against the aspect whereby Schopenhauer’s philosophy seemed morally disengaged, so that he had written that “it is a strange claim to expect a moralist not to recommend any virtue he does not possess”; or, if you wish, the “decadent” and “literary” aspect of his thought due to this disengagement. The atheistic side is continued by Nietzsche and joined to his critique of ethics; the religious side, religion as pessimism, finds its ultimate expression in Martinetti. In the thinkers of religious pessimism we have, in fact, the reaffirmation of ethical normativity; in Martinetti it takes the form of the most radical version of the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy as an itinerary to God. In an approximate formula, we can say that Martinetti joined together the character of revealing deep reality proper to Schopenhauer’s ethics and the normative and rational character of Kant’s ethics; thus, he intensified the metaphysical and religious character of the latter and brought it closer to Platonism. It is in the context of this process of recovery of the ethical-religious side of Kant that we must also understand the precise sense that the term “reason” takes for him,59 rediscovered in the liberation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy from irrationalism and, as a consequence, from the aspect amenable to continuing in Nietzsche. 7. But what is the ultimate reality, the God that this ethics reveals? Here we have the encounter between Martinetti and Spinoza. It is a peculiar Spinoza, because Martinetti denies both the naturalistic aspect and the pan-logistic and pre-Hegelian aspect of Spinoza.60 The first

59 Notice that by “reason” Martinetti does not mean the facultas ratiocinandi but the “intellective intuition, the vision of unity in all its degrees, the power to construct a unitary vision of life, in harmony with the principles of logical activity” (Ragione e Fede [Turin: Einaudi, 1942], 13). 60 See Piero Martinetti, Introduzione alla metafisica (Turin: Clausen, 1904), 360–4.

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book of Ethics is completely sacrificed to the fifth. By abandoning these two aspects, Spinoza’s thought comes to coincide completely with that of Schopenhauer separated from atheism: the process of liberation is no longer directed towards Nothingness but towards a divine unity,61 separated from all the anthropomorphic images that gave rise to supernaturalism. From being the most intransigent monism, Spinoza’s thought turns into the most intransigent dualism. From Schopenhauer’s religious atheism we move to anti-clericalism: to Spinoza, who is the enemy of the churches because he is inebriated with God. 8. The extremization of anti-historicism is the source of the aspect of absolute definitiveness of his philosophy, such that either one accepts it as a whole, with an act of moral decision, or one must radically reject it. This aspect is in fact justified because he does push to the ultimate consequences philosophical-religious dualism and the corresponding image of a philosopher. Now, one cannot help noticing that this position also marks the rejection, as criticism of their roots, of all the philosophical trends of the nineteenth century that extended into our century.62 After all, the full awareness of this rejection is what makes him suggestive, and the criticism of being backward looking (which coincides with the fact that Martinetti is one of the very rare thinkers in which we cannot find any non-romantic features) does not touch

61 See his volume of selections, Schopenhauer, 53–61, where he presents “the thought of Schopenhauer as intent on affirming, beyond negation, something positive, which can only be expressed through symbols.” 62 In fact, what has been said explains his total opposition to all forms of historicism (to Marx, the result of the Hegelian left – i.e., the final outcome of the naturalism implicit in Hegel; to Croce, but also to Dilthey, as relativism), of existentialism (no matter whether coming from Pascal and Kierkegaard or from Nietzsche), of naturalism, of pragmatism, of scientism, of methodologism; besides, of course, to all forms of Catholic thought and to the renewal of Protestant theology. His religious pessimism also opens up an abyss between his thought and every form of modernism, in as much as this latter seeks a reconciliation between religious thought and the philosophy of life and history. In a different sense, we can say that the two fundamental trends of twentieth-­ century thought – Idealism and the philosophy of existence – do exist in him, but truncated. This truncation is related not to eclecticism on his part – nothing is less eclectic than his thought – but to his dualism. It happens because of a contradiction within this position, which should indeed be studied in his philosophy, as the most rigorous form dualism has ever reached.

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him,63 given that among his many refusals there is also the refusal to use the historical actuality as a metric. The true criticism of his thought must concern, instead, the insuperable contradiction between the rationalist-metaphysical moment, which should lead to the thesis that everything finite dies, and the ineliminable need for the salvation of the individual. Therefore one should analyze all the reasons that bring him both to the pluralistic character of his Idealism and to faith in immortality, understood as persistence, even if transfigured and mysterious, “of our best personality and our noblest and dearest affections which are inseparable from it,” accompanied by the explicit rejection of “annihilation into the absolute.” From his perspective, faith in immortality is absolutely necessary because of the radical duality of morality and history. In other words, the truncated metaphysical rationalism that he reaches by separating the religious aspect of Schopenhauer from the atheistic and irrationalist aspect ends up being fatally balanced by an individualism that contradicts it. This contradiction is insuperable but does not take away the importance of his thought. Actually, it gives it a particular significance because it shows the impossibility of a religious renewal that expresses itself in “religion within the limits of pure reason,” in philosophical faith in the transcendent, freed of all supernatural elements; and it brings back today’s terms of ideal opposition to two: philosophy open to the supernatural and radical atheism. Alternatively, we can say, in extremely simple terms: anti-clericalism is correlative to “natural religion” as religious opposition 63 So much so that in his lectures on Hegel (Milan: Bocca, 1943) he defines his adversary, regarding German philosophy of the nineteenth century, as the naturalistic trend, the direct continuation of the thought of the Enlightenment, which culminates in Hegel and continues in the Hegelian left to end in materialism. He fights it in the name of the Idealist trend, which, after Kant and Fichte, continues in the great epigones of Idealism, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer, and reaches us through von Hartmann, Lotze, and Spir. To the thought of the Enlightenment  – characterized by the rehabilitation of human nature, by the idea of progress, by unlimited trust in science and technology as domination that verifies the idea of progress, by the quest to extend the ideal of science to all human activities, by a forward-looking mindset – Martinetti opposes a process of thought focused on the past, on the rediscovery of a lost tradition, destroyed by the Inquisition and by worldly powers. Thus he goes from Schopenhauer to Kant, to Spinoza, to the Cathars, to the Manicheans, to the gnostics, to Eastern thought. Technical science appears to him as “empty knowledge” when it is not associated with the science of good and evil.

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to the Church. This natural religion evolves, losing more and more the meaning of “common element to all religions,” to take that of “pure religion” or “morality.” In Martinetti this line of development reached the highest degree of rigour and at the same time the catastrophe.64 From what has been said, it also follows that the use of the word “heresy” in reference to the most rigorous form of atheism – people habitually speak of Marxism as the latest Christian heresy65 – has no rigorous meaning and leads to inevitable and dangerous confusions. Whereas heresy cannot but present itself as the restoration of true Christianity, atheism cannot but present itself as post-Christianity, coming after its historical death. Therefore, an atheist can never accept being called a heretic because he affirms the death of transcendent Christianity – although, if he is a historicist, in the sense of surpassing it. The situation is different for a Christian because, being unable to accept the idea of post-Christianity, he must maintain that every irreligious position of thought can be traced back to the development of a heresy. But in order to speak of atheism in these terms, he must make a distinction between heresies of the medieval type, as attempts to restore primitive Christianity, and heresies of the Renaissance type (Bruno’s 64 For a broader discussion of his thought see my presentation at the “Giornata Martinettiana” held at the University of Turin on 16 November 1963, to be published in the near future [A. Del Noce, “Martinetti nella cultura europea, italiana e piemontese,” in Giornata Martinettiana (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1964)]. 65 See, for example, Maritain, La personne et le bien commun (Paris: Desclée, 1947), 87; and Maritain, La Philosophie morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 303 [The Person and the Common Good (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 98; Moral Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 240]. It is curious that for Maritain, and much more so for the many people who follow him and exaggerate his assertions, the description of Marxism as the “last Christian heresy” does not mean “condemnation” but “recuperability” because a heretic “preserves.” In actuality, in Marxism there is “preservation” of the messianic mindset because it is a form of historicism and, thus, a position that intends to preserve what was valid in the past. However, in the process whereby Marxism arrives at the “atheistic religion” there is definitely no residue or ferment of the Judeo-Christian tradition because atheism acts as mediator between two conceptions  – the idea of dialectics, tied to the mortality of the finite and Hegel’s inversion of the interpretation of sin, and the idea of Revolution – that deny this tradition in its very first assertion. Interpreting Marxism, because of the “theological” character of the philosophy of history, as a messianic transfiguration of Hegelianism rather than as a logical process that makes Hegelianism most consequential means, in my judgment, falling into the greatest possible misunderstanding, even though Löwith authorizes it.

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philosophy can be characterized as the first heresy of this type), which emphasize the humanistic and worldly aspects, where such worldliness means a fundamental pagan re-comprehension of Christianity. Atheism stands at the endpoint of this type of heresy. In this sense, we can even speak of the Enlightenment as a “heresy of the Catholic Reformation”66 and speak of Romanticism as “the Renaissance after the Reformation,” which is correct if we restrict the meaning of Romanticism to classical German philosophy and its extensions; and we can see in Marxism one of the endpoints of this new Renaissance. But this is not exactly the meaning that many Catholic writers give to the description of Marxism as the “last Christian heresy” … Finally, I think it may be worth adding – since even though these judgments today are rarely formulated explicitly, they nonetheless linger in the evaluations that follow from them – that we must not confuse atheism with a superstructure of immoralism or, conversely, as a legitimate, albeit insufficient from a higher moral standpoint, rehabilitation of vitality. Above all, we must not confuse it with the mere thesis of denying the immortality of the individual soul, because it is not one of its specific features at all. It is all too obvious, in fact, that every form of metaphysical or historicist rationalism, or every form of theological humanism as distinct both from theistic humanism and atheistic humanism,67 holds that same thesis.

3. Criteria for a History of Atheism What I said implies that a history of atheism ought to be part of a history of philosophies in terms of how they conceive the initial Fall, which so far is lacking; therefore, it ought to be part of a history of philosophy tightly linked to the history of theology and not understood as entirely distinct. The consideration of atheism, by shifting our attention to the act of faith at the beginning of rationalism, throws into a crisis the usual

66 Thereby welcoming a thesis brilliantly developed by Ugo Spirito in his work “Rinascimento e Romanticismo” in the appendix to Machiavelli e Guicciardini (Rome: Edizioni Leonardo, 1945). See also La vita come arte (Florence: Sansoni, 1941), 143 [TN: in the original this note is part of the main text]. 67 I use the expression “theological humanism” to indicate the philosophies of the immanence of the divine (Brunschvicg, Croce, Gentile, Carabellese, etc.).

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vision whereby the historical process is directed towards the separation of philosophy and theology. This theme would also be extremely important for the study of Catholic philosophy. For instance, to what extent does the essentialism and abstractism that have been imputed to the Second Scholastics, and in which we must see the reason for its defeat, originate from an initial and undue entification of the abstraction known as the state of pura natura? To what extent has the theological line started by Molina affected Suarez’s philosophy (I mean in its aspect as pure philosophy)? And is not this initial entification of the abstract the reason the critique of Scholastics has taken the form of empiricism (regarding the critique of Scholastics, Cartesianism itself is empiricist, even if it intends to surpass empiricism, after accepting this critique)? Is not the idea of autonomous philosophy rooted in the theology of the state of pure nature? These considerations find immediate confirmation if we shift our attention to the most comprehensive history of atheism ever written until now, the very voluminous work by Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte in Abendland (Stuttgard und Berlin, 1922), in four volumes, which comes down, in effect, to a mere accumulation of materials. In the Preface, dated March 1920, Mauthner writes, presenting the purpose of his work: So that the reader may not have to wait for the last paragraph to know the ultimate goal of this work, I will state my creed right away. I would like to lead those who trust me to a clear and cold altitude, from which all dogmas will appear to be human constructions, historically produced and historically fated to fade away … an altitude from which faith and superstition are equivalent concepts. What I strive to offer … is atheistic mysticism … What had to be written is a “Kultur Geschichte” of the West from the point of view of religious liberation … Instead of “West” I could also have said “Christendom,” that is, the ensemble of Europe’s Western peoples, since they form a whole in terms both of thought and life. We all belong to this Christendom, regardless of belonging or not to a Church, by force of tradition and language. The object of the struggle, the idea of God, is never for me the theological God of one Christian confession … but always the ethnographic God of the “whole Christendom” … Today the sciences of the spirit would like hypocritically to establish new relations with theology, but the natural sciences have been already for a long time outside the Church and poetry is generally atheistic, even when it tries to revive the dead symbols of theism.

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So, for Mauthner the history of atheism turns into a very general history of free thought, in which the most diverse characters are featured: indeed, the first volume goes from the Pelagian and Manichean heresies to “the Socinians in Poland.” They are brought together, of course, according to a purely formal order. Because of this, his material becomes extremely vast, to the point that he cannot control it, nor know it by direct study; thus, it is material that cannot be trusted since it is, by his own confession (page 6 in the Introduction), second-hand. As for Marx, in the midst of all this abundance Mauthner only devotes to him pages 112 to 114 in the fourth volume. It seems that the result of this work is only the fatigue that in the end overcomes the author himself, making him declare (Epilogue, vol. IV, 448) that because of it he is giving up on eliminating some flaws. The general perspective that guides the work is that of a sort of (rather confused) scientistic Nietzscheanism, which somehow anticipates the themes of neo-positivism.68

4 . F r o m t h e c o n c e p t o f at h e i s m to the history of philosophy as a problem So, I said, the criterion of truth of all forms of atheism is the historical end of transcendent religions, which are incapable of guiding people in the true choices imposed by history. Already in this priority given to the historical argument we see the superiority, right now, of these forms over other philosophies of a secular type (here, for brevity, by “secular” I mean every philosophy closed to the supernatural). That is, what characterizes the present time is that it verifies the superior consistency of the form of rationalism of the atheistic kind over the metaphysical form of the immanence of the divine. Thus, the journey of twentiethcentury philosophy seems to be shaping up as the disappearance first of philosophical religion in the transcendent sense and then of the religiosity of the immanence of the divine; thereby, it seems to present us with a radical antithesis. For the time being, we must say, atheism remains on the offensive. What does “on the offensive” mean? The following: that already with the First World War, which started under the 68 The Catholic book by G. Siegmund, Der Kampf um Gott (Berlin: Morus-Verlag, 1960), is rather more correct and quite useful. We must say, however, that even though it contains various astute observations it is a serious work of popularization more than a strictly scientific book.

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banner of the Idealist and secular theist Mazzini, and ended with the victory of his bitter enemy Marx, atheism seems to have triumphed; the moral history of the post-Second World War period seems to be the history of the growing awareness of this victory. But let us go back to the essential topic, the process that must lead us to recognize the history of philosophy as the primary philosophical question. After the neo-positivist critique of evidences,69 and after the various forms of historicism, the only criterion of truth left to secular thought is the claim that an irreversible historical process (however one calls it) today makes it impossible to speak in terms of religious transcendence. Correlatively, the word “modern” takes on an axiological meaning: being up to date with modern philosophy means striving to realize a form of humanism not vulnerable to turning into naturalism (and thus into skepticism and decadentism as its ultimate developments), nor into more or less covert forms of a return to transcendent thought. This axiological meaning also takes the character of moral normativity: the only form of morality is identified in being up to date with the course of history (which is, again, the moral moment proper to atheism). The catalogue of deviations and criticisms has been accurately established: •

•

Philosophies of transcendence today can take the form of academic philosophies, but then they manifest their inferiority by being ­fruitless in terms of the historical judgments that a true philosophy must produce. In short, they replace philosophy with rhetoric, which allegedly today starts by discussing values. As a matter of fact, it is ­undeniable that a large part of Catholic thought has achieved insuperable perfection in the technique of evading concrete problems, so that a doubt arises whether today “Christian philosophy” is not ­defined … precisely by this technique. Or they are practical forms of defence of an institution and, thus, can be considered only in light of the nature of that institution and, as far as their historical development is concerned, in light of its ­politics. This is the standard secular assessment of Catholic thought that remains rigidly within orthodoxy, from the CounterReformation onward. However, today witty comments on the form of the “scholastic treatise” and “college-level arguments” have sidelined these forms.

69 The treatment by Ludovico Geymonat, Studi per un nuovo razionalismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1945), remains unsurpassed in terms of rigour.

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Or they are forms of catastrophic and irrationalist decadentism, which express the state of mind that follows the collapse of the ­practical hopes of reactionary thought; that is, they are the current form of the reactionary “prophecies of the past.” The recognition that the present world is Godless coincides with the declaration that human projects are meaningless (thus, the meaning of atheism is turned upside down); but, on the other hand, it is not the idea of God that leads them to devalue the present world but mere religious nostalgia, so that, in dissimulated form, the truth of atheism is being acknowledged. The formal refinement that they sometimes achieve fails to sustain the illusion about their non-religious content. Or, finally, when they wish to reach historical concreteness in the form of adequate moral, political, and aesthetic judgments, they ­necessarily fall into modernism, which can also be a form of peaceful transition from the old to the new vision of the world.

That these four forms exist is undeniable; that they are the only ­possible ones is the judgment of secular thought, which I am calling into question. We can call this approach the historicist solution to the problem of the starting point of philosophy. Accepting it already means going from Idealism to historicism. On the ground of historicism, then, atheism wins, as will be clarified shortly. Let us acknowledge, though, that in fact this historicist solution has been practised by all the philosophies of our century, except the religious philosophy of existence, which has in this stance one of its principal original features. All others have formed within an already prefabricated historical vision, inherited from the nineteenth century. We find a precise awareness of this situation in the criticism that, now thirty-six years ago, Gabriel Marcel raised against Léon Brunschvicg: I believe I understand that in his view a freely thinking spirit today finds himself … in circumstances that no longer allow him, without a rationally unjustifiable regression, to subscribe to any affirmation of the supernatural. I insist on this word regression. According to Brunschvicg, in this domain there is for sure a sort of definitive spiritual acquisition, something we need not revisit. It would be the equivalent, in short, of what happens in the sciences of nature, in which we can agree, with slight reservations, that acquisitions of this kind exist, developments which are by right irreversible or irrevocable. Now, I am inclined to argue that the metaphysical spirit is

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defined precisely by a massive calling into question, and thus by the refusal to accept this irreversibility, this irrevocability in its own domain. It seems to me that formulas like “today we can no longer allow,” “by now it is impossible” lose all applicability when we engage in that global evaluation that, ­despite everything, lies at the heart of every metaphysics.

Now, Marcel’s view is based on the idea that “the religious problem exists only for the individuality that affirms itself both as real, because it desires and suffers, and at the same time as finite, as dependent, that is to say as one monad” in opposition to Brunschvicg’s identification of spirituality and scientific mindset (“from the perspective of Western philosophy, the properly religious effort will then consist in thoroughly maintaining, in all processes of human consciousness, that attitude of total detachment from one’s own person, of total devotion to the idea, which is the ascesis proper to a scientist”).70 Marcel’s objection contains three exceptionally important points: 1. Every immanentistic position is always tied to the theme “by now it is no longer possible.” 2. There is a necessary link between this theme and the denial of ­individuality (if anything, the individuality of the single man will be replaced by the individuality of his work). 3. Therefore, the reaffirmation of metaphysics is tied to the question of the effective recognition of the individuality of the single person (which implies abandoning the thesis, which was typical of oldschool metaphysicians, that the obligatory and necessary starting point of philosophy has to be sought in some first evidence). And it is also tied to the critique of “by now it is no longer possible” and thus of the vision of the history of philosophy as a process of ­secularization. Having said this, it seems we are authorized to view the critique of the dogmatism of the “modern” as today’s primary philosophical problem.

70 Bulletin de la Societé française de Philosophie of March 28 1928, from a meeting devoted to the “Querelle de l’Athéisme.” The sentences by Marcel are on page 81, those by Brunschvicg on page 79. In 1927, Brunschvicg’s Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris: Alcan, 1927) and Marcel’s Journal métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1927) had appeared.

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However, we need to add: 4. that Marcel’s response to Brunschvicg was victorious in a way that to us today looks strangely easy, even though it certainly was not at that time. Brunschvicg’s neo-criticism drew its apparent strength from the critique of gnoseological realism – that is, from confusing the problem of realism with its gnoseological version. His history of the “progress of consciousness” claimed to be the history of a ­constant victory of a form of Idealism linked with science against the false metaphysics based on the realistic mindset and, thus, tied to the superstitions and myths of the common people. It was the ­historical illustration of his philosophy. In actuality, dualism was only verbally negated by him, but effectively presupposed; it was, of course, a ­dualism of the Enlightenment type, altogether different from that of Martinetti, which I discussed, which was Romantic and explicit. The true decisive criticism of it was raised, in the same ­meeting of the Societé française de Philosophie, by Gilson.71 5. We understand then why the problem of criticizing the dogmatism of the “modern” did not seem so decisive to Marcel as it does to me today. Reclaiming the reality of individuality, at bottom, coincided for him with affirming the discontinuity of the history of philosophy. I think instead that we must speak of continuity within essences; and I already said that the transition within rationalism from the ­position of the immanent divine to that of atheism is necessary.

71 Gilson correctly highlighted (Bulletin, 57–8) an unresolved dualism at the bottom of Brunchvicg’s thought. Even though he spoke of the creative power of the Spirit, and sometimes created the impression that for him it was thought that conferred being to the universe being thought, and that generated the existence of nature, nonetheless, as a historian, he talked about the activity of thought that coordinates forever the motions of things and the events of life, about the stages that thought goes through in the building of science, about the hurdles it overcomes, about a realistic mindset that constantly opposes its progress, and so on. He granted, in other words, the existence of things that existed apart from the spirit that coordinates them. Given this, how could one avoid the question “why something rather than nothing,” which is proper to Thomistic metaphysics but is also shared by existentialism, which was being born at that time? This is why his fortunes declined after 1930. In relation to what will be said later, it seems clear that there is a necessary connection between his inability to understand revolutionary thought and the inability to understand medieval philosophy.

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6. Without the idea of the irreversibility of the historical process, ­therefore, historicism, neo-positivism, and Marxism are completely unthinkable. Let people try and make Marxism as “open” as they like: still, they will never be able to eliminate the idea of the ­irreversibility of the process from feudal society to bourgeois society, and from this latter to proletarian society, and of the sequence of corresponding philosophical visions; likewise, for historicism, the ­irreversibility of the process from mythical thought (revealed truth) to metaphysical thought and then to historical thought; and so on. So that there is an analogy between a medieval Christian thinker and a contemporary secular thinker. The former started from Sacred History, which he considered unquestionable;72 the latter starts from profane history and from the assertion that since the time when the new Science was born a world has come into being that rises to the dignity of a philosophical event because it can find its justification and its self-awareness only in philosophies that break radically away from the supernatural, even if they understand the novelty of Christianity with respect to ancient thought, and even if they ­maintain, so to speak, the Christian anthropology, albeit entirely ­secularized. This is proven, supposedly, by the failure of all attempts at a Catholic restoration, from the Counter-Reformation to the ­nineteenth century. 7. Furthermore, this irreversibility, in the way in which it is affirmed by recent forms of rationalism, is not at all the construction of ­genealogies that could be organized only on the basis of a philosophy that thought itself to be “definitive” – while, correlatively, a philosophy thought to be definitive could only produce history understood as construction of genealogies. Rather, it is viewed as the result of ­considering philosophies in their precise historicity; in the extreme case, Marxism – which incorporates the history of philosophy into general economic, social, and political history (an incorporation that is not a simple “reduction”) – claims precisely to account fully for the “humanity” of philosophies. Marcel’s objection seems to lose meaning in reference to the historiography of positive atheism to the extent that this latter does not confuse at all, like Brunschvicg does, criticism of individualism with “the ascesis of the scientist.” 72 See in A. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium (Milan: Principato, 1933), the perfect definition of the attitude of medieval thinkers towards history.

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In light of this, it seems legitimate to define the primary philosophical question for today’s philosophical thought in the following terms: Is it true that there is no other way to think about modern philosophy except as a process towards total immanentism, which cannot but take the form of radical atheism? Or can modern philosophy be characterized only problematically by the rise of the problem of atheism, so that the solution of the problem is not prejudged at all by a continuity that exists only in the development of rationalism and in the development of the form of empiricism that accepts rationalism’s presupposition? That is, and it is the same question: Is it true that in every philosopher, from Descartes onward, the fruitful motif – that is, the one able to establish critical continuity – is the secular motif? While everything else, in the philosophers who profess to be Christian in the transcendent sense, is just a compromise that, because of its practical character, is not philosophy? Against this assertion, three objections can be raised:73 the first, that historical periodization is a purely empirical scheme, always relative to the point of view of the periodizer. Its construction obeys criteria of practical convenience: Is it not entirely ridiculous to make 73 A study of the protective screens to avoid this problem would deserve a separate chapter. The typical example should be found in Croce, who, on the one side – in La Storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1938), page 297 of the 1943 edition [History as the Story of Liberty, trans. S. Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941), 302] – opposes “divisions by chronological periods” because of their “practical origins and empirical use,” but on the other side – for example, in Storia d’Europa nel secolo XIX (Bari: Laterza, 1932) [History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. H. Furst (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934)] – builds on the foundation of the secularity of modern philosophy as opposed to transcendent medieval philosophy. In short, he builds on the entirely dogmatic acceptance of a vision of history that is … a common feature of the philosophy of history of the 1800s; so much so that to conclude the first chapter, “La Religione della Libertà,” he recalls, making it his own, the Joachimite scheme. How much philosophy of history, in the man who claimed to be the rigorous theoretician of historicism, as the position antithetic to the philosophy of history! Regarding the influence of the Joachimite scheme on the formation of the philosophy of history, and the reference to Joachim already in Lessing, and also on his work’s influence in disseminating it, see K. Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 208–12. On Lessing’s encounter with Joachimism, see also W. Nigg, Il regno eterno (Milan: IEI, 1947), 321ff). The harshness of Croce’s polemic against Toffanin would be incomprehensible if Toffanin’s thesis on humanism had not posed a threat to his interpretation of Vico, which is the necessary meeting point between his philosophy and his history, or actually a history book that is,

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the problematization of a didactically useful fiction the primary philosophical question? The second: Is it not possible that this period of a little over three centuries, in which supposedly the irreversible process is visible, was just an epoch of crisis? And who can pronounce a judgment on the crisis and on progress, if not a philosophy that establishes itself and is valid independently of the consideration of the history of philosophy? The third: By making the problematization of the history of philosophy the question that today presents itself as philosophically primary, are we not denying the eternity of metaphysical problems, and indulging in historicism, as if there were no contradiction between the historical dimension and the dimension of transcendence? Regarding the first objection, I only have to refer the reader to pages 330–4, to which I attribute absolutely fundamental importance. There I have tried to show that to construct any possible history of modern philosophy one cannot do without the figure of the “Cartesian beginning,” in the precise sense I have defined; and that, conversely, the nature of Descartes’s thought forces us to speak of a new period of the history of philosophy because it cannot be understood as a development of previous positions of thought. Consequently – because of the necessary reference every later philosophy makes to it, and because of its particular nature – the problem of distinguishing between the religious and the secular aspect of his philosophy, and of determining which one of the two must be regarded as the critical aspect, is exceptionally important.

peculiarly, a necessary chapter of his philosophy. Croce literally loses his temper when he sees threatened the unproblematized historical vision of the course of thought within which his philosophy has come together, and whose problematization would require a total revision. Conversely, the importance of the analysis of the concept of “modern” has been emphasized by Husserl, La crisi delle scienze europee (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961), 44 [TN: The Crisis of European Sciences (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 14–15]. Such analysis has been conducted by Franco Lombardi in Nascita del mondo moderno (Asti: Arethusa, 1953), in a form that of course is very different from mine, but on the same problem (constantly referring to what I call the historical actuality), and with extremely important suggestions, even when the suggestion is to think the antithesis. A comparison would be indispensable, but I must postpone it until after I present synthetically my perspective, which I am doing in this book.

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Regarding the second objection, the meaning of my answer will become clear later, after the demonstration of the character of absolute novelty of contemporary history, in as much as it is philosophical history. For now, I will just remark that the Marxist vision of historic irreversibility leads to a critique, whose persuasive appearance is undeniable, of the positions that reduce the modern world to a catastrophic crisis. Allegedly, their error is manifested by the impossibility of achieving consistency between thought and life because the radical condemnation of the modern world cannot avoid seeking, in order to be consistent, its own political expression. Now, in this political expression, it has been able to reach historical reality only in the form of Fascism – understood as a term that unifies its three stages (Action Française, Italian Fascism, and Nazism) into a continuous process, whose type will have to be defined. Thus, it has reached historical reality in a form that is measured philosophically, in its final outcome, by the irrationalist type of atheism (i.e., by nihilism) and that expresses, from the social standpoint, the bourgeois form of reaction, in which the previous position of reactionary thought – which was anti-bourgeois because of its radical condemnation – is channelled. So that, allegedly, the condemnation of the “nihilism of the modern world” has necessarily resulted – because of a changed historical reality that it wants to reject – in supporting a position that gives rise to the most absolute form of nihilism!74 For those who start from this condemnation, or insist on repeating it, there is only one alternative: to declare that the catastrophic character of modernity is irreparable and cannot be overcome practically. But then the result will be a form of absolute passivity, which can only translate, in practice, into saying yes to anything and anybody; which is linked either with an aspiration for a “God to come” that, however, remains absolutely formless and is thus nothingness, or with nostalgia for a “past God” that 74 It is from this point of view that it would be interesting to study the stance of Catholic counter-revolutionary thought towards the forms of counter-revolutionary thought that have been active in our century – namely, the sympathies that the greater part of French Catholic intellectuals (Maritain, many of the Thomist philosophers, Bernanos, etc.) harboured for L’Action Française until it was condemned; the attitude of Italian Catholic culture towards Fascism; nor can we forget the adhesion to Nazism, albeit interpreted in a particular way, by Carl Schmitt, the greatest disciple that Donoso Cortès has had in our century. Conversely, how does Maritain break up with reactionary medievalist thought, if not by recognizing that “the historical situation is different”?

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cannot be restored; it is linked, in any case, with that contradictory atheistic condemnation of atheism that, as we have already seen, has been identified by secular thought as the decadent form among the possibilities left open to religious thought. The import of this critique will be discussed later. However, for now let us observe that those who formulate it cannot but refer to a vision of history, which claims to be superior because it makes possible consistency between thought and life. So, given that this critique is conditioned on a vision of history, and given that, in practice, thinking philosophically is always answering a historical adversary, it seems undeniable that there is nothing paradoxical about determining today’s theoretically primary problem in the terms I have used. As far as the third objection is concerned, I think I must answer that thinking in relation to the historical actuality does not mean denying the eternity of metaphysical problems but, rather, recognizing it in their true sense. Because excluding the theme of progress, both in its scientistic and historicist senses, is certainly what characterizes metaphysical thought and is the foundation of the distinction between metaphysics and science; but, in order for this exclusion to be valid, it is also necessary that we unburden metaphysical thought of the immobilization in formulas that makes it liable to look like the alienated image of a certain historical situation; it is necessary that a certain concept of progress apply also to metaphysical thought, which can only be expressed as “explication of the virtual.” Excluding progress and historicism cannot have any other meaning than asserting that “the metaphysical problem is that which nobody else can have solved for me” and which therefore presents itself to me in always new terms, by reason of the novelty of the historical situation. I do not have in front of me some sort of list of problems that have already been solved, which can be collected in a treatise. On the contrary, it is in the course of the personal process of solving the metaphysical problem that I recognize my thesis as the explication of a “virtuality” of an affirmation that was already made in the past. And it is precisely in this “explication of a virtuality” that the metaphysical thesis becomes “evident” to me, breaking free from the always contingent form it had taken in its historical formulations.75 75 This point, which historically is Newman’s problem, is crucially important in order to define the concept of liberalism. Please allow me to linger here for a moment on my memories of the unforgettable Felice Balbo because the problem, as he used

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Rather than following from a latent rejection of eternity, the recognition of the historical context is motivated by the need not to confuse the eternal and time.

5. Visions of History and the Idea of Revolution In essay V, I discussed (pages 293–8) the idea of Revolution as an ideal category that is reached through a philosophical process at the end of which we find the greatest radicalization of atheism, combined with a form of materialism that does not reduce at all to an instance, or to a development, of naturalistic materialism. We must now observe that the great visions of history formed in the first half of the nineteenth century in connection with the historical question of understanding the French Revolution – that is, the question of a post-Christian civilization.76 Let us recall the essential ones: the Hegelian vision, the Marxist, that of Saint-Simon and Comte, that proper to the Catholic restoration – we can say from de Maistre and de Bonald to Leo XIII (see pages 327–8). In fact, all others formed in opposition to these, among them:

to say, of the distinction between “form” and “formula” seemed to him to be essential for contemporary Catholic thought. Hence his admiration for the book by Spanish theologian Marin-Sola on the homogeneous evolution of Catholic dogma [TN: Francisco Marin-Sola, The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, trans. A. Piñon (Manila: Santo Tomas University Press, 1988)], which indeed, by illustrating the concept of virtuality, represents the meeting point between Newmanism and Thomism. 76 On this point, see the issue of the Revue philosophique devoted to La Révolution française et la pensée moderne (1939) and, especially, the articles by H. Gouhier on Comte (it is the meditation on the event of the French Revolution that makes possible the transition from pre-positivism, whose beginning can be dated to d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire à l’Encyclopedie, to positivism. See also Lesson 57 in the Cours de philosophie positive) and by J. Hyppolite on Hegel (by whom see also Genèse et structure de la Phénomenologie [Paris: Aubier, 1946], 438ff). See also G. Lukàcs, Il giovane Hegel (Turin: Einaudi, 1960) [TN: The Young Hegel (Boston: MIT Press, 1976)], in which references to the French Revolution are ubiquitous. And the recent literature on the importance of the reflection on the French Revolution in the formation of Hegel’s thought is extraordinarily large. As for Marx and De Maistre, the situation is very clear. About the presence of the Maistrian-Bonaldian scheme at the beginning of neoThomism, see footnote 29 in essay VI.

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1. the counter-revolutionary line within the “Renaissance after the Reformation” that classical German thought represents. This line no longer conceives the counter-revolutionary return as a return to the spirit of the Middle Ages but to the East or to “tragic” or anyway pre-Socratic Greece: from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Heidegger. I think we can say that in Scheler this line gets combined with the Catholic counter-revolutionary line through a continuation of the primarily anti-Marxist side of Nietzsche. 2. The counter-revolutionary line of German Catholic thought that starts from Franz von Baader, also in opposition to the process ­towards Hegelianism. It aims at freeing the results of German Romantic thought from pantheistic or atheistic or revolutionary ­aspects. Thus, it understands Romanticism as a philosophy of the Restoration, attributing to this latter a religious, and actually ­explicitly mystical, character, with the idea that Romanticism can ­realize itself in its total opposition to the Enlightenment only as ­traditionalism. It has to go from Jacobi to Saint-Martin, and from Saint-Martin to Böhme interpreted in a Catholic sense. This line would deserve to be investigated much more than has been done so far because of the very innovative elements it contains and because of the decisive influence it still exerts on a large part of German Catholic thought, even very recently. 3. Schelling’s anti-Hegel line, which – after meeting Böhme too, and coming close to Baader – continues in the most important line of Russian philosophy before Marxism, that of Solovev (its stages are: the encounter with Dostoevsky, the Dostoevsky-Nietzsche question, the break with Schelling, the formation of the philosophy of the Russian emigration, the beginning of the philosophy of existence). In the Swiss Secrétan, who is in some way Feuerbach’s antithesis, this line encounters in a new way Descartes after Schelling, discovering the crucial importance of the Cartesian theme of divine freedom, and formulates the program of a rediscovery of French philosophy after German philosophy. 4. Renouvier’s line, which forms against the philosophy of history of Saint-Simon and Comte. 5. The French philosophy of action, which finds its inspiration in Leibniz separated from what continues in German philosophy and is, thereby, led to view Pascal as an anti-Jansenist and as opposed to Descartes at the same time. This line forms in a position that

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somehow parallels the line leading to neo-Thomism.77 It rediscovers tradition above all as Augustinism, which at first was set in radical ­opposition to Thomism (Laberthonnière) and then reconciled with Thomism according to a particular interpretation thereof (the last Blondel). It is, in any case, opposed to neo-Thomism (in its most common meaning) because it is a philosophy of interiority as ­opposed to a cosmologism, because it conceives an agonistic rather than a justificatory theodicy, and because it rejects the “anti-modern” by finding a kinship with the tradition of seventeenth-century French Catholic thought in the quest for a philosophy that is Christian by ­essence and not by accident. 6. The neo-criticist line, which originated from the critique of the ­materialism in which had ended a trend originating from the postHegelian critique of religion. In its endpoint it is led to extend the Kantian critique of metaphysics to a critique of the philosophy of ­history, in a form of historicism inspired by Kant rather than Hegel (which is why the historicism that begins in Dilthey is different from, and irreducible to, that of Croce). 7. The pure Protestant line, which, starting from the antithesis rather than the affinity between the Renaissance and the Reformation, goes back to the original spirit of the latter against modern ­philosophy drenched with Pelagianism (Barth).

The fact that the first three were thought in the nineteenth-century form of the philosophy of history (which does not exhaust at all, as we shall see, the meaning of the philosophy of history), namely, from the perspective of an ultimate end that must necessarily become realized – as a consequence, essentially, of the idea that the system is definitive – and that because of this character they encounter, secularizing it, the theology of history, is a relatively secondary problem compared to the question of their origin in the quest to understand the revolutionary event. We can certainly say that the standard visions of history have formed within a theological perspective, in the sense that the idea of Revolution is an answer to the theme of the fall (see essay V). However, this may mean not that they are secular transcriptions of a biblical scheme but, 77 Eighteen seventy was the year of publication of Ollé-Laprune’s La philosophie de Malebranche (Paris: Ladrange, 1870), which makes manifest the break with Malebranchian Ontologism, in the name of Leibniz’s critique.

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rather, that the theological theme is ineliminable, and thought entirely freed from theology is impossible. So, if the standard visions of history have arisen in connection with the problem of understanding and locating the French Revolution, is it not natural to think that the investigation forced upon all of us by the historical situation of having to understand a new revolution, which expresses the fullness of the revolutionary idea, must lead us to criticize those visions? The question here should be why this question, as the fundamental problem of contemporary philosophy, has taken so long to come up, and why it still meets so much resistance. The explanation is actually quite easy. Clearly, for several reasons, the first to raise this question should be Catholic thought: because, unlike Protestant thought, it recognizes the legitimacy of the philosophy of history; because this critical process leads, in the final analysis, to a positive reinterpretation of the Catholic Reformation; because it brings new visibility to the Catholic thought of the 1600s; because Protestantism contributed to define the classic historical periodization and today is being forced – after a Protestant interpretation of modern German philosophy and an adaptation to it of its theology – to fall back on anti-modern positions, although radically different from the Catholic anti-modern since, in this latter, there is a tight connection between theology and politics, and in the Protestant anti-modern there is dissociation. Many “becauses” then; but Catholic thought is powerless to address them as long as it remains in those four positions that were exactly defined by secular thought.

6 . T o wa r d s a C r i t i q u e o f t h e O r d i n a ry Vision of the History of Philosophy Nobody can fail to appreciate either that the problem I posed is extremely important or the fact that until now it has not been the subject of in-depth study. But in what sense can one say that it is precisely the problem of placing atheism in the history of philosophy that calls into question the standard vision of modern thought as a process of secularization? Such vision presents itself as unquestionable in an Idealist-immanentist conception because such a conception must reduce atheism to naturalistic materialism and thus criticize it as a dogmatic and naïve form of realism; a realist presupposition that is also that of religion, as transcendent and supernatural religion. But then, on the one side, libertine atheism must not be taken into consideration, reducing it to a practical

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phenomenon; nor, on the other side, Marxian and Nietzschean atheism. Consequently, Scholasticism, not the disintegration of Renaissance thought, is viewed as Descartes’s primary adversary. In this opposition, the emphasis, regarding Descartes, is placed on the cogito or on the mathematization of physics, while the process of the Meditations is viewed as a list of Descartes’s infidelities to “Cartesianism,” which has become an entity de jure, a sort of normative essence, known not to Descartes but to his historians. In Leibniz the critical and progressive “monadic idealism” is separated from the archaic “monadologic realism.” In Kant one sees only what continues in Fichte because every form of immanentism of the Idealist type must in the final analysis go back from Hegel to Fichte (see Gentile). Thus, the history of philosophy turns into a process of liberation from transcendence, naturalistic as well as religious, distinguishing two aspects in every modern thinker, until all residual realism is finally abolished … in the philosophy of the author who is telling the story. In this liberation from transcendence, Thomism meets the same fate as Marxism. We find the most rigorously consistent example of this vision in Brunschvicg’s most significant work, which not by chance is titled Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. It is characterized, indeed, by pure rationalism, understood in such a narrow fashion that it excludes not only naturalist and irrationalist forms but also the philosophies that surpass themselves by transitioning into religious thought or revolutionary action. Hence, it excludes Marx from the history of philosophy so consistently that it ends up excluding Hegelianism and the thought of Rousseau (viewed as the father, at the same time, of Catholic Romanticism and of Jacobinism, falsifying the meaning of the French Revolution), which are seen as mere instances of negativity. Hence, it also excludes Nietzsche, viewed as the anti-progressive thinker par excellence for being anti-moralist, anti-socialist, anti-democratic, anti-feminist, anti-intellectualist, anti-pessimist, and anti-religious (with respect to Brunschvicg’s philosophical God, of course); and consequently it excludes Schopenhauer, also viewed as a regressive thinker. Thus, and above all, Brunschvicg’s idea is that transcendent religion is the supernaturalist antithesis of naturalism within the same realistic framework. Its genesis is explained very easily: Does realism affirm that matter is given in itself but also exists by its own power? In order to believe that one is escaping materialism, it will suffice to transcend the power of homo faber into the analogical imagination of a Deus fabricator

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coeli et terrae. “Superstitious religion” is based on the analogy between God and a human craftsman or the father of a family since the generative function is the most typical function of living beings; the necessarily authoritarian character of positive religions is tied to this second analogy. Supernaturalism is easily explained starting from the idea of God the maker of heaven: the divine craftsman must be beyond heaven, and this leads us to affirm the existence of a region populated by invisible and supernatural realities. From the perspective of authentic religion, we must oppose to this God of vulgar realism a God alien to every form of exteriority, who manifests himself only in the interiority of conscience, as the root of all values that all consciences equally recognize, and thus as the principle of communion through objectivity, understood as the universality of truth and values. But this God “in spirit and truth” is fully antithetical to the God of vulgar realism. Therefore those who have wished to profess allegiance to him most rigorously have found themselves exposed to the accusation of atheism by the rabble and by the churches (like Socrates, like Spinoza, like Fichte). I wished to bring back the memory of a philosopher of great intellectual and moral seriousness – such that he earned the esteem of adversaries of all sides, amazingly erudite, as well as an unusually elegant writer, whose influence dominated France between 1920 and 1935, and whose thought today is in effect completely forgotten by reason of being radically incompatible with the orientations that prevailed after 1930 – because perhaps in no other thinker is the thematic nexus proper to the rationalism of divine immanence made so consistently explicit. Provided that atheism is reduced to naturalistic materialism, its critique can only develop in the form of gnoseological Idealism against realism, where this latter is understood not as affirmation of the ontological reality of the finite but as the existence of material reality as a given in itself; hence the reduction of nature to science, and of science to spirit; hence, too, the equally necessary extension of the critique of materialism to that of transcendent religion, and the affirmation that there is a link between religious transcendence and supernaturalism understood in a magical sense; hence the opposition of Idealism’s philosophical God to the religious God, which presupposes vulgar realism. In light of this, the interpretation of the development of modern philosophy, or even of all of Western philosophy, as a process of increasing secularization is not in the least an arbitrary adjustment to which history lends itself because of its pliability – which is possible because the history of thought

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is larger than documented history – but is strictly necessary as a consequence. This answers an objection I will certainly face: there is a fairly widespread idea that general visions of the history of philosophy are constructions of genealogies and, as such, they are necessarily aprioristic, based on “reconstructions” of each philosopher rather than philological investigations. In contrast to them, supposedly, the true historian rediscovers, as he goes about his work, the value of the nominalist attitude. Precisely for this reason the criticism of those general visions, which has already been conducted in the name of rigorous historiography, can never be the starting point for theoretical research. This objection presupposes that there is, on one hand, the determination, independent of history, of a philosophy, and then, as a subsequent act, the distension of this philosophy into history of philosophy. On the contrary, a philosophy actually always is, and always was, a history of philosophy because it must account for positions of thought different from its own. Therefore, theory and history of philosophy are two inseparable aspects of the unfolding of one and the same essence. Let me better explain this perspective. Until not many years ago, at least in Italy, a certain view of the history of philosophy was unquestionable. Essentially, it could be summarized as follows: “only those who have a precise philosophy can engage in the history of philosophy. Otherwise they will engage at best in philology or history of culture.” People of a certain age will remember, for example, the judgment about Gilson’s being a historian but “not a philosopher.” Speaking of another among today’s greatest historians of philosophy, Gouhier, if he had been known at that time he would inevitably have been judged to be – as a scholar of the journeys of philosophers in search of their philosophy, who is concerned, above all, with the story of a spirit rather than with the systematic unity of his ideas – a “biographer,” a “psychologist” and nothing more. A book of history of philosophy was then thought to be the reconstruction of a system of thought starting from a first idea from which all others were deduced, and this in the best case; in the most common case, the historian of philosophy proved his philosophical spirit by considering a philosophy only according to the aspects in which it seemed amenable to be surpassed and sublated. And we know that this attitude manifested the worst side of Actualism.78 The process,

78 [TN] Attualismo, the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, which is often translated in English as “Actual Idealism.”

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that is, went only one way: from philosophy to the history of philosophy. And how did one arrive at such a philosophy, which enabled him to write history? Evidently by a choice, which in most cases was hardly rational. From the perspective I am proposing, which actually agrees with today’s common habits, one can very well become a philosopher through the history of philosophy. To criticize a philosophy, one can start from the history of philosophy it must produce, to the extent that it is unable to explain this or that other form of thought. For example, immanentist Idealism is incapable of explaining both transcendent metaphysics, which extends into theology and religious life, and atheism. This is because its attempt to unify the critiques of transcendence (spatially represented) and materialism (reduced to its naturalistic version) failed completely. Let me also say that today the investigation of philosophy through history imposes itself as a necessary approach because the non-unifiable multiplicity of philosophies and the abstract possibility of multiplying them indefinitely pushes us to consider the real genesis of the terms we habitually use. Look, for example, at the term “Idealism”: it has been said, quite correctly, that “every Idealism is theological.” Now, the confirmation lies in its origins, which must be found, rather than in Descartes, in the “theocentric” interpretation of Cartesianism in Geulincx and Malebranche. It is born, and in fact it is continued, in Berkeley’s empiricist adaptation based on the conviction that the critique of atheism boils down to that of naturalistic materialism, and it is accompanied throughout its history by this conviction. I already said, more generally, that the genesis of all modern philosophical categories can be investigated only through the process of thought that goes from Descartes to Vico, an investigation that I have tried to outline schematically in essay VI. Therefore, being a form of theological thought, Idealism could only present itself as surpassing theological thought in a transcendent sense. But at the same time, as I documented, it could not but exclude atheism from its consideration, both in the form of its birth (the libertine erudites) and in its more rigorous forms, and simultaneously it could not but avoid a philosophical consideration of the idea of Revolution. It was forced not to move beyond the vision of Lange’s old History of Materialism – which had been occasioned by the developments of Feuerbachism, in the aspect in which this latter, when it refused to be surpassed by Marxism, had moved back towards eighteenth-century materialism, and, consistently, had to exclude Marxism from its discussion.

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The renunciation of considering both the birth and the terminal forms of atheism was necessary because, since its beginnings, modern Idealism had reduced atheism to naturalism. Let us now consider the history of philosophy as can be envisioned by Marxist thought. There are only two possible ways to present Marxism as the insuperable result today in the history of philosophy,79 viewed in its dialectic connection with economic and technical development. The first way is that of vulgar Marxism: presenting the history of philosophy as the history of materialism, the only form of truly scientific thought. However, besides the unbearable paradoxes to which it leads, or would lead if anybody pushed it to its final consequences – namely, Lamettrie’s thought would be the full explication of the critical moment of Cartesian philosophy,80 or even, Marx would be the reaffirmation of d’Holbach after Hegel! – it emphasizes very prevalently the naturalistic aspect, so that it ends up effectively suppressing what is essential to Marxism, the dialectic aspect. The second way is the one that must be reached, and has been reached in Goldmann, by the line inspired by the young Lukàcs and, as far as I can tell, also by Bloch; namely, establishing in the history of modern philosophy an irreversible sequence of world visions: rationalism (the philosophy of the bourgeoisie), tragic thought (whose essential

79 Because Marxism, in its critical form, can only present itself as historical, not definitive, truth. 80 This is what, for example, Vartanian says in Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). But this is a thesis that needs no refutation. In reality, in order to explain the reference to Descartes in the materialism of the early 1700s, we have to think of the rediscovery, in the second half of the 1600s, of libertinism, which took place via the mutual neutralization of Cartesian and Gassendist metaphysical themes. In the common cultural opinion, Gassendi’s critique had the effect of devaluing, as a compromise with tradition, Cartesian metaphysics; conversely, Descartes without the metaphysics was regarded as the teacher of anti-finalism, and his arguments had the effect of discrediting Gassendi’s finalism. The rediscovery of libertinism, as libertinism that feels authorized by science, takes place within the context of Gassendism deprived of its finalistic metaphysics, which is also regarded as a mere form of homage to tradition. But there is a long way from this to saying that the  materialism of the 1700s brought into focus the new and critical theme of Cartesianism. What really matters in Vartanian’s book, instead – which confirms perfectly my thesis presented on pages 330–4  – is that the necessary reference to Descartes as initiator is also present in the materialism of the 1700s, as it is in all other forms of modern philosophy.

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representative is Pascal), and dialectic thought, which surpasses tragic thought. Supposedly, after dialectic thought there is only room for the futile effort to separate the terms “materialism” and “dialectic,” and to fight Marxism either as materialism (Idealism) or as dialectic (existentialism). The end result is the destruction of reason, which verifies the truth of Marxism, posing the choice in terms of socialism versus barbarism. In the context of the critique of the second way (developed in essay VI), the introduction of the concept of atheism as a position ulterior to that of the immanence of the divine, and the definition of modern philosophy in relation to the problem of atheism, has led me to a vision of the French (Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche) and Italian philosophy of the 1600s and early 1700s that is rather different from the traditional vision. I have established that there is a continuity between these philosophers because they share a common adversary, libertine atheism (up to Vico’s opposition to Bayle); this line moves towards a rigorous formulation of Ontologism as the attempt to go beyond Pascal’s anti-humanism. I have also established that this development moves in the absolutely opposite direction with respect to that of classical German philosophy, so that we can describe it as an anti-Renaissance because at all its stages it contains the germs, but not the full implementation, of the critique of subsequent secular positions. Thus, in Pascal we have the rigorous critique of the pre-Enlightenment aspect of the thought of Descartes; it coincides with a formulation of criticism that may be regarded as superior to that of Kant, except that such critique coincides with radical anti-humanism. Thus in Malebranche’s affirmation of Ontologism we have an overcoming of Pascal’s anti-humanism, except that we also have the beginning of modern Idealism and an inflexion in the direction of future theological rationalism. In Vico’s critique, within the continuity in Cartesianism, we have the full reaffirmation of Christian humanism separated from the heresies of the Renaissance and, at the same time, the separation of Ontologism from Idealism and from theological rationalism, but not yet a clear definition of the metaphysics that underpins his philosophy of history. Can the prolongation of this line – which of course coincides with the line of the Italian philosophy of the Risorgimento, viewed from the angle of being irreducible to classical German philosophy – be said to be relevant today? Can we find in it the motifs we need to surpass the ideal and practical difficulties of the contemporary world? The form that this problem must take will be spelled out in the final pages of this book.

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7. The Role of the Religious Philosophy o f   E x i s t e n c e i n P r o b l e m at i z i n g the History of Philosophy In essence, we can say: Marxism has presented itself as the denouement of classical German philosophy, being convinced that previous philosophical trends have been permanently surpassed by it and that subsequent philosophies just constitute a futile effort to fight Marxism itself (they correspond to the decadent stage of the bourgeoisie). We must observe: Marxism is the outcome of just one of the two processes of classical German philosophy, while the other one ends in Nietzsche. But even within the dissolution of Hegelianism there is a position that Marxism cannot criticize since Marxism is the reaffirmation of Hegelianism only after its humanistic and existentialist dissolution in the Hegelian left: namely, Kierkegaard’s position, which is characterized by the opposite answer with respect to Marx to the same problem – that is, the critique of the Hegelian relationship between philosophy and religion. Now, whereas Nietzsche’s thought cannot enter into a direct dialogue with that of Marx, so large is the distance – the largest that ever occurred in the history of thought, which I have already highlighted – whereas, in other words, it cannot surpass it nor be surpassed by it, nonetheless it contains a perfect diagnosis of the contemporary world as it turns out after the Marxist revolution. And whereas Kierkegaard’s thought is in the same situation in terms of surpassing, it can help make manifest the original presupposition of rationalism, the act of faith at its root, and is able to problematize the standard vision of the history of philosophy upon which Marxism finds its foundation. I will now try to discuss briefly this second point. It implies a general view of the historical stages of the religious philosophy of existence, which can be expressed in the following propositions: a. Its true beginning lies in Pascal and in the seventeenth-century fracture of Augustinianism, which was necessary within the significant structure of Cartesianism (i.e., the fracture between existentialism and Ontologism in Malebranche’s form, which I discuss on p. 339–40). A consequence of this fracture is the intrinsic character of this philosophy as a crisis of Christianity: crisis of the Christianity of the Catholic Reformation in Pascal, crisis of the Christianity of Reformed theology in Kierkegaard, crisis of the idea of European unity based on secularized Christianity in the forms of philosophy of existence that emerged

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after 1920. The crisis, however, is exceptionally fruitful because in its first Pascalian phase the nature of atheism becomes clear, in the Kierkegaardian phase the same happens for Idealism, and in the most recent phase the standard view of the history of modern philosophy as a unitary process falls apart. But the crisis must be overcome, and it cannot be, in my judgment, except in Ontologism, not in neoThomism, nor in spiritualism, nor in Christian personalism.81 Because otherwise it is undeniable that Pascal is liable to be surpassed in dialectic thought (see pages 387–8), and Kierkegaard in Heidegger’s thought, even though this latter then finds again, in a particular fashion, the problem of Ontologism. b. The religious philosophy of existence has in Pascal not only its beginning but also its summit, as is proven indirectly by the fact that the two fundamental directions of positive atheism are led to face him

81 By neo-Thomism I mean not the thought of St Thomas but the neo-Thomist commentary, characterized by considering Ontologism its essential adversary. In this regard, one ought to study the unjustly neglected work by Fr M. Liberatore, La conoscenza intellettuale (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1857). His critique of Giobertism, which is developed within the same “anti-modern” scheme as Gioberti’s Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, leads Fr Liberatore, after Gioberti’s political-religious defeat, to affirm that Ontologism is also modern, tainted by the Cartesian error, thus contributing decisively to the formation of the historical vision of neo-Thomism, which is theoretically determinant. In the first stage of the history of neo-Thomism, the condemnation of Ontologism is part of the general condemnation of modern philosophy; in the second stage there is the idea that the process of modern philosophy – first as positivism, then as Idealism, and now as phenomenology  – must ultimately come to an agreement with Christian thought, freed from all traces of Cartesianism and Ontologism. I think calling into question the initial condemnation of Ontologism is the essential question for contemporary Thomism. By “spiritualism” I mean, in a rigorous sense, the line that proceeds from Maine de Biran, or that merges into Biranism, also starting from the rediscovery of the positive moment of Cartesianism in the theory/experience of freedom. In a more generic sense I mean the eclectic forms, in which all the oppositions between Christian philosophies get watered down. Regarding Christian personalism, I think we should recall that the introduction of the term “personalism” goes back to Renouvier and that he attributes its discovery to his friend and teacher Lequier. While I realize that I am stating an unfamiliar thesis, which would deserve a broad treatment, I believe I can give an overall definition of Christian personalism, at least in its French form, in terms of a reaffirmation of Lequier’s Catholic thought after Renouvier’s secularization. See my essay “Jules Lequier e il momento tragico della filosofia francese.”

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in their quest to establish their own truth. For Marxism this is demonstrated precisely by Goldmann’s work; it is also demonstrated by the constant dialogue that one can intuit between Nietzsche and Pascal, despite the paucity of quotations. c. In the transition from Pascal to Kierkegaard we have a narrowing of perspective. Kierkegaard’s adversary is not, in fact, atheism but Idealism as “Christian philosophy” (hence his particular ambiguity, which has often led people to raise the question of whether he really believed or not, and to think that answering is impossible; and the discussions whether his thought has an apologetic or merely phenomenological character, etc.). In relation to this, one can raise a further question: Why is it impossible to use, in reference to Pascal, the two categories that until thirty years ago were habitually used to rethink the whole history of philosophy – namely, Idealism and realism? How could he not suspect that in Descartes there was the possibility of an idealistic development? I think that there is a very precise reason for this impossibility: the true birth of Idealism in the modern sense takes place in a different answer to the same adversary that Pascal was facing. Indeed, Malebranche’s and Berkeley’s philosophies arise in opposition to Pascal’s same adversary; but for them the critique of atheism boils down to that of atheistic naturalism and not that of the atheistic choice itself – the question of choice that was rediscovered, instead, by Dostoevsky. How this replacement took place, and within what context of problems, is a question that I will examine in another book. d. The aspect of crisis of this philosophy is due to its subordination in opposition to its adversary. This is very visible in the dependence on Machiavelli revealed by the political side of Pascal’s thought, and also in Kierkegaard’s stance towards Hegelianism. Therefore, with respect to tradition, the religious philosophy of existence manifests itself as the abandonment of all the themes that led to Vico’s “civil theology,” of the idea of religion as the foundation of culture and civilization; hence, the general stance that external and public life is a matter of indifference to religious life. A correlate of this negation of civil theology is the understanding of transcendence as separation. The disproportion between divine justice and human justice in Pascal, “the infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity” in Kierkegaard, the “totally other” in Barth; at least in the sense that the recognition of the great distance between God and man is the condition for opening the possibility of an encounter. These aspects explain why it is a psychologically easy

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possibility to go from the religious philosophy of existence to atheism, even though this process has no semblance of logical necessity. In this regard, there is no more expressive text than this, from Marx’s Economical and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover created my life – if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it.”82 In fact, it is characteristic of atheism to always present transcendence as separation; in this regard, one ought to consider the presence of the atheistic temptation – always rejected but never completely overcome – in Lequier, and above all the perception Nietzsche had of himself as a new Pascal freed for good from the ravages of Christianity. Atheism presents itself as a recovery from a religion that in existential thought is crisis. I prefer the term “crisis” to the term “tragic” because religious thought is always an overcoming of the “tragic.” e. In religious existentialism the theme of Deus absconditus takes a decidedly non-mystical character. On this we should bring up, as a text I think of as decisive, the parallel that Gouhier draws between St John of the Cross and Pascal.83 For the Spanish mystic God is hidden because of his transcendence and elicits a journey of the soul, moved by desire to contemplate the divine essence. By contrast, in Pascal we have a God who wants to hide, and the mystery of the divine essence is replaced by the mystery of his decrees; in his case, therefore, we cannot rigorously speak of a mystical experience. The thesis of God’s mysteriousness and impenetrability, radical anti-gnosticism, is thus essential for religious existentialism. Overall we can say: to the possibility in mysticism of falling into pantheism corresponds in existentialism the possibility of falling into radical atheism. It is clear that this interpretation of existentialism – whose beginning must be found in the seventeenth-century fracture of Augustinianism – differs from the usual ones: very clearly from the interpretation that 82 [TN] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 144. 83 See the essay “Le Mémorial est-il un texte mystique?” in Blaise Pascal, l’Homme et l’Ouvre, Cahiers de Royaumont.

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views religious existentialism as the full development of Platonism into Augustinian interiority, and from that which says that we should look for its first outline in Aristotle’s critique of Plato. And it calls, at the very least, for extreme caution in finding precursors among the many patristic or medieval oppositions of Jerusalem to Athens, or in the polemics against scholastic intellectualism in the name of Christian existence. But above all it is important to point out that this interpretation is opposed to that whereby the existentialist tradition coincides with the irrationalist one. This view is held in two opposite forms by two opposite critics of the “trahison des clercs”: by the first, Benda, in the name of rationalism radically separated from dialectics; by the second, Lukàcs, in the name of dialectic rationalism. According to Benda existentialism is just the modern form of a perennial position, “the will to exalt the fact of being alive, of feeling, of acting, of ‘existing’ as opposed to the fact of thinking, and in particular of thinking about existence.”84 According to Lukàcs, instead, it represents the necessary form of “destruction of reason” that the polemics against dialectical thought must take; hence, its historical time span coincided with the philosophy of the dissolution of Hegelianism in as much as it opposed at first the 84 Tradition de l’existentialisme (Paris: Grasset, 1947), 11. This interpretation refers to Benda’s essential philosophical book, Essai d’un discours cohérent sur le rapport de Dieu et du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), in which he draws the theoretical conclusions of his interpretation of the crisis of values in the world after the First World War. He had developed it in Trahison des clercs and in Fin de l’éternel, interpreting the crisis as metaphysically revelatory because it expressed a rebellion of vitality against reason. The book is extremely interesting because the rationalist Benda finds himself forced to  trace his way back to the first presupposition of rationalism, which is described exactly in the terms of the myth of Anaximander (even though it is not mentioned). Namely, in phenomenic being there are two wills, one to affirm oneself as distinct, the will that builds the phenomenic world, and another to return to the non-different, which Benda calls the will to return to the infinite God. But then this infinite God reduces to indeterminate being in as much as it is opposed to the imperial and distinct God. Being born from reflection upon the crisis, this position leads to radical and pessimistic dualism because the will to return to God is not necessary for the phenomenic world and may even disappear. The extremely remarkable significance of Benda’s work lies in the pessimistic inversion of the classic French tradition of nondialectic rationalism; this inversion marks the complete opposition, in the philosophy of crisis, between dualism and existentialism. In particular, it is interesting to observe that the thought of the paradoxical Benda is the exact antithesis of that of the paradoxical Shestov. See my essay “Il dualismo di Benda,” in Rivista di filosofia 37 (1946): 153–74.

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possibility (Schelling-Kierkegaard), and then the reality, of the Marxist sublation of Hegelian dialectics.85 I, too, partially endorsed this second thesis in the 1946 essay republished here (pages 194ff and 208ff) regarding the historical period of existentialism. I defined its rediscovery in the twentieth century as the expression of a painful historical crisis whose historical nature people did not grasp.86 As a result, they thought the crisis was natural and insuperable, and thus revealed man’s ontological nature. By doing so, I adopted the perspective that existentialism is merely a patient of the crisis, destined to be surpassed by Marxism and valid in its criticism only of Idealism; although, even then I refused to view it just as a necessary process of decadence, from Schelling to Hitler, which is the thesis that Lukàcs later advanced (see page 209). I now think, instead, that if we behold Christian existentialism in its entire history, without reducing it to a moment in the crisis of Hegelianism, and if we see its first and most rigorous form in Pascal, we must conclude that, even though it is not able to surpass Marxism and all that flows into it from the philosophical tradition, still it serves the purpose of problematizing the original rationalist presupposition, rationalism being much more than just Idealism. However, in the years after 1945 it was extremely easy to make this mistake. We must not forget that between 1920 and 1940 Marx, seen as a thoroughly outdated thinker, had almost completely disappeared from the European cultural perspective and that his rediscovery was preceded by that of Kierkegaard. Because of this eclipse of Marxism, the thinkers against whom very young people chafed after 1930, and in relation to whom they had to take a stance, were in France the Idealist Brunschvicg and in Italy the Idealist Gentile. No wonder then that in the 1930s the religious side viewed existentialism as playing first of all an anti-Idealist role, and the secular side a post-Idealist role, and that at that time Pascal’s thought was completely overshadowed by Kierkegaard’s.

85 G. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. P. Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1980). 86 This explains the ethical-political disengagement of the pure forms of philosophy of existence in the 1930s, to the point that they have been described as decadentism – see N. Bobbio, La filosofia del Decadentismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1944) – using the term in a sense that, however, is not completely rigorous. Heidegger’s “passivity” is typical as the aware acceptance of an irreversible destiny, which is the ultimate explanation, then, of his attitude towards Nazism.

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In my personal case, that first work on Marxism was, as I will briefly explain later, a rediscovery of the interpretation of the young Lukàcs through a peculiar process without any direct influence whatsoever. Therefore, it is not strange that, within that thought process, I articulated some theses that he had not yet explicitly formulated. The ethical-political inadequacy of existentialism also explains why some people could interpret it as the philosophical expression of decadentism; which is very true if we limit the notion of decadentism to that of practical disengagement, of the paradox whereby students of an existentialist philosopher live happily with the crisis rather than trying to overcome it! However, if we understand the nature of decadentism in a rigorous sense, we have to say that its genetic process is completely different from that of the philosophy of existence. This latter arises against Idealism in the name of a demand for truth. Conversely, decadentism is the final outcome of the loss of the idea of truth in naturalism. I certainly need not recall here the well-known thesis regarding the contradiction that, on the one side, naturalism cannot but present itself as the expression of an objective truth but, on the other side, it tends to turn into skepticism because it must regard every theory as a natural product, an expression of the necessity that governs nature, and thus conclude that all theories have the same truth value. However, it is perfectly clear that in order to characterize decadentism we cannot stop at this pure inversion of naturalism into skepticism. Skepticism is possible only in reference to the idea of truth, thought to be unattainable – that is, it is still a rejection of naturalistic dogmatism within philosophy. On the contrary, decadentism draws the ultimate consequences from this naturalistic dissolution of the idea of truth, destroying the very idea of philosophy. So, it is most opposed to naturalism while, at the same time, it is its logical continuation. This is proven by the materialism, pushed to the extreme, and by the desire to ally itself with science – viewed as the destroyer of taboos and personified as the hater of every form of transcendence  – that characterize Surrealism, whose analysis is crucially important because it is probably the extreme form of decadentism. Conversely, between skepticism and decadentism there is opposition without continuity, as proven by the fact that skeptical thought leads to extreme conservatism, whereas decadentism in its pure state – that is, Surrealism – pushes to the extreme the idea of revolt. Having ruled out every form of communication among subjects in the truth, man’s

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liberation takes the form of rebellion against the cosmic order, where this idea of cosmic revolt must include that of social revolution. That is to say, decadentism, which has reached its maximum purity in Surrealism, can be defined historically as an attempt to re-comprehend Marx within Sade, which is instructive to show the total heterogeneity between these forms of thought and to clarify the absolute incompatibility between the atheism of naturalistic materialism and the atheism of dialectical materialism. It is a rebellion, and thus a practical attitude; we might say it wishes to surpass the revolution preserving it in the rebellion. This is why Surrealism strives towards practice, but it is also why it is ineffective. The reason is that the moment of pure revolt dissociates from the idea of revolution because, for the latter, the idea of truth is essential; it is essential, therefore, to achieve a reconciliation with reality, which cannot but exclude the idea of cosmic revolt: “pure revolt is metaphysical, and can only lead, if it does not let itself be channeled by the experience of another world, to opposing to our universe a reality which is not and could not be a world.”87 In other words, cosmic revolt cannot give up the need for the Other because if it did so it could not even take shape; but, on the other hand, this Other cannot take the form of a “world,” be it that of religions or that of revolutions. And yet this dissociation cannot be recognized by Surrealism because what can a cosmic revolt that does not include a social revolution be, except a complete escape? Hence the constant and futile quest for political effectiveness, which expresses itself in the absurd hope for a revolutionary (in the Marxist sense) and non-totalitarian party (how could that be?). Therefore, the cosmic revolt comes down entirely to aesthetic activity, which perforce can no longer include any practical value but must simply oppose natural reality and traditional values; hence, art understood as “derealization” of the world; hence, the particular meaning of the Surrealist primacy of dream over reality. At this point we may wonder whether decadentism should be viewed, as it has often been, as a morbid form or a degeneration of Romanticism. Actually, I think we must say that it is its complete antithesis; not by chance its true beginning must be found in Sade, the endpoint of the atheistic materialism of the 1700s. This does not mean that decadentism and Romanticism did not meet historically. Indeed, initially the revolt expresses itself as a dissociation between values and truth, and thus in

87 F. Alquié, La philosophie du surréalisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1955), 81.

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the reduction of values to myths, but in a particular sense of the word “myth,” according to which it is used to condemn present reality (pseudomysticism in forms of religious decadentism; unity of decadentism and nationalism in D’Annunzio; etc.). Therefore, at this initial stage decadentism and reactionary spirit are strangely united because these myths, in as much as they are directed at condemning the present and are devoid of their own content, must find it by referring to a past and distant world, which is the object of nostalgia (and this is where the illusory appearance of a common nature of decadentism and Romanticism arises). But the developmental process of decadentism, which also clarifies its essence, manifests its dissociation from Romanticism. Thus, in Surrealism, the revolt extends to the myths themselves as forms of reconciliation with the past and thus of negation of the cosmic revolt. At a certain moment refusal turns into rage and manifests itself in an artistic activity that cannot be traced back to the traditional idea of art because it expresses a refusal rather than a catharsis. As a consequence we cannot speak, in rigorous terms, of a philosophy or a politics of decadentism because an essential aspect of this attitude is that it can only express itself in pure aesthetic activity, understood to absorb all other values, even though in fact this absorption means their pure negation. Having thus delimited the concept of philosophy of existence, we only have to shift our attention to its two core themes – namely, the opposition of freedom and necessity, and the refusal to absorb the individual into “any totality,” against Spinoza and against Hegel – to see that it agrees with the new critical literature on Descartes. This latter is characterized by the affirmation that freedom is the “soul of Cartesianism” (see page 345) and by the consequent dissociation of Descartes from Spinoza and Kant, whence it follows the affirmation that Cartesianism is not surpassed by classic German philosophy, the idea that there is a continuity between Descartes and Pascal, and the affirmation that Pascal’s criticism cannot be reduced to Kant’s. Also, we cannot fail to notice a close parallel between its formation and that of the “Philosophie de l’Esprit.” The claim that the philosophy of existence needs to be continued in Ontologism is expressed in Lavelle’s philosophy, which is a rethinking of Malebranche without the aspects that made it liable to be surpassed by German thought.88 88 This could be the starting point to study the sharp distinction between his Ontologism and that of Carabellese, whose Obbiezioni al Cartesianismo (Messina: D’Anna, 1946) must necessarily place great importance on Gassendi’s criticisms in

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It is important to emphasize that this return to pre-Kantian thought is tied to the recognition of the plurality and irreducibility of philosophical traditions. Koyré perfectly writes: “Descartes’s’ freedom could say ‘no’ to the world, to nature, to illusion, and on this ‘no’ it could found the ‘yes’ of adhering to clarity … ; but Heidegger’s freedom can never say ‘no.’ It always says ‘yes’ and when it decides, its decision is acceptance. In this way it will never be able to free itself from error, from delusion and from confusion.”89 Conversely, in Jaspers and above all in Heidegger – against the previous trends of neo-criticism and especially (in a different sense) of Husserl – the need to separate German philosophy from French philosophy and from Cartesianism comes to the surface. On the other hand, as we shall see, the development of the new Cartesian criticism leads to recognizing Ontologism as the proper character of Italian philosophy (essay VI). Clearly, we must not understand this reaffirmation of the plurality and irreducibility of philosophical traditions, which the philosophy of existence has occasioned, in a nationalistic sense, as one could have affirmed in the spirit of Taine. In my judgment, we must understand it in the sense that in order to comprehend modern philosophies we cannot ignore the theological factor – that is, their relations – either by continuity or by opposition, with different theologies, either Catholic or Protestant. This is because I think – against an opinion that used to be common but now, after Barthism, is on the wane – that German philosophy arises in opposition to Protestantism, even though it is still somehow conditioned by it. And I also think – against the old opinion that set in opposition modern philosophy and “Counter-Reformation” – that the critical motifs of modern philosophy started precisely within the Catholic Reformation (essay VI). About the meaning of the word “Ontologism,” it will be possible to define it precisely only in a subsequent volume of the research that I am starting with this book. For now I will restrict myself to the following historical definition (see p. 386), which concerns its beginning in modern thought with Malebranche’s attempt to surpass Pascal and Malebranche’s continuation in Vico: the history of modern Christian order to establish a continuity between Descartes and Kant while, instead, Lavelle must eliminate from Cartesianism everything that made it vulnerable to such objections [TN: in the original this is a parenthetical statement]. 89 “L’évolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger,” Critique 1 (July 1946): 73–82, 161–83.

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Ontologism coincides with that of the reaffirmation of humanism after Pascal’s critique, and with the recovery of metaphysics after criticism, seen in Pascal’s form and not in Kant’s. Or we can say generically that, with respect to Augustinianism, it emphasizes the aspect of being a philosophy of the presence of God, while being different from religious existentialism because of the prevalence in this latter of the theme of the “hidden God.” However, it is important to reject two definitions. First of all, the one that views Ontologism as a form of rationalist decay of mysticism. This thesis permeates many habitual historical judgments, even if it is rarely stated explicitly. To understand it, let us refer to the simplest definition of mysticism, that given by Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la Philosophie: “the belief in the possibility of an intimate and direct union of the human spirit with the fundamental principle of being, a union which constitutes both a way of existing and a way of knowing foreign and superior to normal existence and knowledge.” Now, allegedly Ontologism is characterized precisely by the affirmation of this union but as if it defined the normal condition of man. This is why Malebranche’s philosophy has often been described as “mystical rationalism.” These synthetic formulas seldom escape the danger of ambiguity, and this one can be easily understood in the sense of naturalizing the supernatural. However, the fact is that Malebranche thinks he can be the first to give an organic and consistent form to the ontologist orientation because he believes that Cartesianism set the indispensable philosophical premises to distinguish between the natural intuition of God and mystical experience in the strict sense. It set the conditions to use the expression “vision of God” in reference to natural human knowledge, without undermining the distinction between natural and supernatural. The limits he assigns to rational knowledge are strictly similar to those set by Thomist thought (in this life we know God not according to his absolute essence but through creatural participation; we only have rigorous knowledge of the essence of bodies; even the intelligibility of the nature of our soul escapes us). The true critique of his thought must rather concern “theological rationalism” (for its definition see note 106 on page 391). Now, cannot the further development of modern Ontologism be viewed as a process of liberation from theological rationalism? I think that the final stretch of this dissociation of Ontologism from theological rationalism must be found in Rosmini (whose thought I believe we must qualify as Ontologism, thus

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abandoning the meaning of the word “Ontologism” coined by neoThomism, because of the near tradition to which his thought links back). A second imperfect and inadequate definition is the one that I myself proposed, years ago, in the entry “Ontologism” of the Enciclopedia Filosofica. At that time I had been struck by the close symmetry between the relationship of Malebranche with Descartes and that of Carabellese with Gentile, and I had tried to build a historical definition based on this symmetry. Obviously, the differences between them – whereby Malebranche views real Being itself as the object of intuition whereas Carabellese reduces Being to Idea, to pure object immanent in consciousness, and the former meets a particular form of Augustinism whereas the latter meets a peculiar and hardly Augustinian Rosmini – depend on the two philosophers they want to continue. In Malebranche, Ontologism coincides with the radical development of Cartesianism – understood as amenable to an Idealist continuation, which he thinks can eliminate on the one side the Spinozian threat and on the other side the materialist threat, and the Enlightenment to come. In Carabellese, Ontologism is meant to coincide with the radical development of the second Idealist revolution, Kantian criticism – in such a way as to eliminate both classic German Idealism and its final antimetaphysical inversion – and also positivism. Mutatis mutandis, the essential adversaries are the same for both: pantheism (at least in the sense of evacuating finite subjects into one Substance, or into one Subject), materialism, naturalism (of which scholastic cosmologism is allegedly a weaker expression), agnosticism, and gnoselogical skepticism in all their aspects. In both of them the cogito is de-emphasized with respect to Being. And Malebranche’s idea of God as the “locus of all spirits” finds a secular transcription in Carabellese’s thesis of objective Conscience, the environment of all thinking entities. Likewise, the attention prière naturelle of the former, as a religious transfiguration of Descartes’s methodical doubt, has a counterpart in the latter’s definition of philosophy as effort of transcendence into pure spiritual objectivity. Therefore I was necessarily led to conclude that Ontologism is modern and that, in reference to the sequence of its forms, we cannot speak of an internal historical development since it is the necessary form that the radical positions of modern Idealism must take when they intend to preserve the idea of philosophy as metaphysics and avoid an inversion in which they are also forced to deny themselves as Idealism. This thesis was possible because I had not gone more deeply into Vico’s

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thought, in which at that time I recognized the continuation of the theme of verum factum, which is already present in Occasionalism but not Ontologism. Conversely, I now think that in the modern centuries Christian Ontologism has experienced a true development and that only after we define it in reference to Rosmini can we truly study the tradition of Ontologism in St Augustine and in medieval thought. Does it make sense to speak of non-Christian Ontologism? Such a question, which was unheard of until a few decades ago, today takes a particular meaning after Carabellese and after Heidegger (and, partially, for French thought, after Alquié). About Heidegger we must observe that Ontologism never penetrated, not even as a possible form of thought to be reckoned with, into Germany, the land of the “Renaissance after the Reformation” (its geographical boundaries were strictly limited to Catholic countries and we can detect some ontologist aspects in Germany only in Baader’s thought). Today when Ontologism is inserted into the German tradition it takes the aspect of a return to early Greek philosophy. This gives rise to several complex problems that I cannot tackle here. But at least to set the terms of the question, let us pinpoint the distinction by observing that the inversion carried out by Carabellese takes place within modern philosophy and the inversion carried out by Heidegger takes place against modern philosophy; Carabellese represents Mazzini’s religiosity developed to its ultimate awareness,90 and Heidegger the maximum extension of Nietzsche’s critique of the ­modern world. This distinction measures how far apart they are, but it does not take away the fact that the thought of both was affected by Actualism – a thesis that, regarding Heidegger, who probably never read Gentile, may seem paradoxical (but it is not) because Heidegger’s general vision of the history of philosophy, which he develops in his book on Nietzsche, is the exact inverse, at every point, of Gentile’s. We realize here the importance of the Gentile question since Heidegger

90 It is extremely curious that within Italian immanentism the Idealist Gentile refers chiefly to Gioberti, and the ontologist Carabellese chiefly to Mazzini. In fact, in Carabellese’s case it cannot be a philosophical transposition of a political passion. It is enough to consider the common structure of his two books, L’idealismo italiano (Naples: Loffredo, 1938) and L’idea politica d’Italia (Rome: Signorelli, 1946) to realize that the reference to Mazzini is necessary. Although certainly the obligatory reference to the most outdated of all political thinkers of the nineteenth century  – that is, Mazzini – suggests how to identify what makes Carabellese’s Ontologism outdated.

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himself can be presented as the absolute inversion of his thought. But now, what else is Actualism, in its essential aspect, if not the secularization of Christian Ontologism in Gioberti’s form? Thus, the critique of non-Christian ontologistic forms must start, as we shall see better later, from a truly rigorous examination of Actualism, from an exact definition of its residues, which are as strong as they are unaware, of the nature of its catastrophe and of its place in the history of philosophy.

8. The Place of Marxism in the History of Philosophy A criticism that I will certainly face concerns the importance I attribute to Marxism, to the point of viewing it not only as an essential aspect of the insuperable endpoint of the form of thought I have called rationalism but also as an endpoint that, in order to manifest its full significance, must be separated from every combination with other philosophies and from every aspect – even if it is present in its original formulation – that lends itself to a combination, which would actually be an absorption.91 That is, Marxism does not refuse all forms of deepening, but only the form of deepening that claims to be a synthesis. Since it can only present itself as the denouement of classical German philosophy, able to preserve everything progressive that has been realized in the history of thought, its deepening cannot but coincide with a critique of the possibility of reconciling with other forms of thought that, logically, it has already surpassed even if, chronologically, they have presented themselves as coming after it. This is because every reconciliation would effectively be a subordination. Hence also the form that a truly rigorous internal criticism of Marxism must take: Does it really achieve the unity of philosophy and politics, or is it fated to decompose, instead, into two opposite positions without a dialectic relationship, that of a philosophy completely subordinated to politics and that of sociologism as absolute relativism? The word “decomposition” calls to mind the crisis of

91 Absorption is the typical character of the position that is usually called “revisionist,” and the considerations above show that Sartre does not escape revisionism at all. Within what we call critical Marxism (the young Lukàcs, Bloch, Goldmann) there is also a process of revision, which, however, is defined by its character of absolute opposition to that revisionism, albeit naturally differentiating itself from dogmatic Marxism, which, shut inside pure fidelity to the letter, gives way to the revisionist critique.

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socialism after 1890. Lenin’s attempt was to overcome the crisis by returning to the Hegelian origins. Can we say that his attempt succeeded, or is the decomposition raising its head again today? Defending my point of view is extremely easy. We must distinguish, ignoring any question of orthodoxy – besides, it would be quite hard today to decide who should judge orthodoxy – between scholastic Marxism and critical Marxism. Scientistic scholastic Marxism, which is an involution into naturalistic materialism, is certainly outside of philosophy; the usual criticisms, which I will briefly mention later, apply to it. The character of critical Marxism – like, for example, that of Bloch and that of Goldmann, to whom I especially refer in these essays – is to criticize philosophy, instead, as closed conceptual discourse in the name of surpassing philosophy (which does not thereby cease being philosophy) by transitioning into revolutionary action. This approach parallels medieval Christian philosophy, which, having been born inside religious experience, is not absolutely autonomous and is a stage that is surpassed by transitioning into mystical life. When it makes itself precise as historicism and as critique of evidences – since Marxism cannot present itself without contradiction as a position that cannot be surpassed in the course of history (it can present itself only as the truth of the present time, in as much as it is able to situate it with respect to past epochs and to the epoch to be created today) – critical Marxism must necessarily take up the motif of the pari, recognizing it as the decisive turn in the history of modern philosophy. It is led from this to a necessary comparison with Pascal, given that, like Pascal, it knows no proofs other than moral and historical ones. The form of its pari is this: “we have to choose between Socialism and barbarism.” It the possibility of a hope that becomes learned through proofs that can only be historical. It is clear, however, that there is not an absolute symmetry between Pascal’s pari and the Marxist one. Pascal’s pari precedes the historical proofs. On the contrary, “we have to choose between socialism and barbarism” needs a whole vision of history, which confirms Marxist philosophy. Namely, it needs a vision in which (if we consider it in its political terms) liberalism is not an eternal value but, rather, a political form inseparable from the epoch of the rise of the bourgeois class. At that stage this class will express itself philosophically as rationalism, whereas in the epoch of decline it will seek its ideological cover in irrationalism and its political defence in what in Communist language is generically called “fascism,” whose outcome is renewed barbarism,

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absolute nihilism. Of course, even though this is not clear at all to many people, such vision is unsustainable without accepting all the categories of theoretical Marxism.92 I discussed the historical proofs in essay VI and the concept of liberalism in essay VII. Now, going back to the subject of the first two essays, which aimed at defining the place of Marxism in the history of philosophy, I will also need to deal with the form of the pari in which it concludes. The question will be whether it is very different from the one that has been proposed (the choice between socialism and barbarism) because the insuperability of Marxism also turns out to be the insuperability of its contradiction. But let us begin by considering the objections that can be raised against such insuperability within rationalism and against the philosophical character of Marxism. The most common criticism today concerns Marxism’s uncertain character, straddling philosophy of history and historicism, so that

92 This link between rejection of theoretical Marxism and practical nihilism was meant to be the topic of Lukács’s work The Destruction of Reason: History of Irrationalism from Schelling to Hitler; however, what resulted was a book that could not please  – besides, of course neo-Enlightenment types and orthodox Marxists – even the exponents of what I have called “critical Marxism” because its author intends it to be a (failed) attempt at a reconciliation with Stalinism. It would be too much to say that, whereas History and Class Consciousness [trans. R. Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972)] is an attempt to make rigorously explicit Lenin’s philosophical position (as is true), The Destruction of Reason is a Stalinist book. This is because – setting aside the Stalin quotes, and above all the intentional silence on the correlation between Stalinism and Nazism – we can grant that its thesis is Marxistically obligatory and that many observations are truly remarkable. However, what the book manifests is the impossibility of depicting the trajectory of non-Marxist German philosophy as a process that took shape, aware or unaware, at first against the themes of the transition from Hegel to Marx, and then against Marxism. As far as the first stage is concerned, the statement is relatively true for the later Shelling but neither for Schopenhauer nor for Kierkegaard nor for Nietzsche. Unless one simply means to say that these thinkers are anti-Hegelian, and that in their anti-Hegelianism there is the root of their anti-socialism, at which point the thesis loses significance because it is too obvious. As for the return to Kant, it did not take shape specifically against Marx but generically against the materialism reached by the Hegelian left, particularly in its ultimate form as scientism. In fact, there is only one philosophy that built itself by criticizing Marxism, and that is Italian neo-Hegelianism, particularly in Croce’s form. It is all too easy to observe that it originated from the 1895 to 1900 querelle on Marxism, out of which even the thought of the disciple of the old Hegelians, Gentile, came out transfigured.

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supposedly it needs to be reconciled with the form of historicism coming from Dilthey and Weber, viewed as historicism absolutely separated from Romanticism, which therefore liquidates the theological and messianic aspects of Marxism. I think we must respond that Marxism, in its critical form, is a reaffirmation of the philosophy of history after historicism. It is certainly historicism because it renounces the end of history and the necessary process that must lead to it; but it is still philosophy of history because of the aspect of faith and hope, of atheistic religion that is still religion even after denying every revelation, every supernatural and every philosophical theism; these characteristics set it apart from relativistic historicism and from the process leading from historicism to sociology. Indeed, Goldmann never talks about historicism, and he constantly uses the expression “philosophy of history”; but it is a philosophy of history that somehow accepts the neo-Enlightenment critique, the replacement of necessity by possibility, while rejecting all attempts at surpassing Marxism by transitioning into neo-Enlightenment thought. “Atheistic religion” and “philosophy of history” are inseparable terms in the Marxist conception: Marxism preserves the “sacred” but in the form not of a transcendent religion but of the philosophy of history. In this respect, it would not be incorrect to present Marxism as an attempt at a “restoration of the sacred” after the deaths both of God and of the “divine.” Only understanding their connection allows us to correctly assess the meaning of Marxism and, consequently, to properly interpret the meaning of contemporary history. So much has been said about the features that characterize Marxism as a “secularized form of biblical thought” (Marx as the last prophet of Israel, prophetism, messianism, eschatology; characterization of his thought as a “secular religion” according to his adversaries; as the beginning, albeit with misunderstandings, of a rediscovery of genuine biblical thought, according to certain Catholic “progressives”) that it will suffice to transcribe the following passage by Löwith because it summarizes it in a few lines: The “last” antagonism between the two hostile camps of bourgeoisie and proletariat corresponds to the Jewish-Christian belief in a final fight between Christ and Antichrist in the last epoch of history, the task of the proletariat corresponds to the world-historical mission of the chosen people, the redemptive and universal function of the most degraded class is conceived on the religious pattern of Cross and Resurrection, the ultimate transformation

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of the realm of necessity into a real of freedom corresponds to the transformation of the civitas Terrena into a civitas Dei, and the whole process of history as outlined in the Communist Manifesto corresponds to the general scheme of the Jewish-Christian interpretation of history as a providential advance towards a final goal.93

Moreover, there seems to be a place for miracles and for grace: How could Marx and Engels have risen above their social class to found scientific socialism if not through a form of thought not determined by their social condition and, thus, if not by breaking, miraculously indeed, the laws of historical materialism? The Hegelian and Marxist sector of the history of philosophy seems to form a sort of sacred history in which the thought of Hegel is the Old Testament and that of Marx is the New Testament, and so on. But how did this parallelism come about? Should we invoke reminiscences, the unconscious, ethnic features? Can we carry out a psychoanalytical study of Marxist thought? Should we interpret it entirely in terms of its messianic meaning, which, when expressing itself in an immanentistic conception, causes a return to mythical thought? We thus get to the idea of a “secular religion” as a return to a primitive form of religion, which should be exhibited in the “conservatory of superstitions, room of millennialists.”94 It is easy to recognize in this type of criticism a reflection of Spinoza’s thesis about the “imagination of Prophets.” But can we use a thesis of Spinoza to criticize Marx, the post-Hegelian? So, in order to decide whether or not Marxism has a philosophical character we must raise the general question of the philosophy of history. And condemning the philosophy of history is one of those rare things about which all non-Marxist Western thinkers seem to agree – Catholic and Protestant theologians, secular thinkers, and pure historians. Theologians say: the philosophy of history is the contradictory transcription at the immanent level of what makes sense only at the theological level; and whereas the theology of history, which deciphers meaning in the name of Revelation, does not mix itself up with history 93 Löwith, Meaning in History, 44–5 [TN: I slightly modified the translation]. 94 J. Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), XV [Sociology of Communism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), which however does not include the quote because it comes from a new introductory essay that Monnerot added to the French 2nd edition].

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and actually guarantees its autonomy, the opposite is true for the philosophy of history, which, mixing itself up with the history of philosophy and with history, compromises its scientific character. Secular thinkers say: the philosophy of history replaces the idea that history is the only reality with the idea of a definitive state towards which history is directed, the City of God and the Eternal Kingdom; or it replaces real humanism, which implies the idea of the possibility of progress, with the category of necessity. For historians, abandoning the philosophy of history is required in order to free history from its ancillary function with respect to philosophy. This agreement alone raises suspicion. We must observe: (1) there is a philosophy of history that thinks that history has now ended. With respect to it, the criticisms by historicism are valid; (2) there is a philosophy of history that, instead, is linked to revolutionary thought, and the reciprocal is also true, there is no revolutionary thought without a philosophy of history. Are the historicist objections also valid with respect to this form? Or, rather, as Marxists think, does historicism start from an already presupposed distinction between comprehending (philosophy as the methodology of historiography) and changing, which conceals an actual indirect reconciliation with the existing order – which in practice means with the historical period in which historicism was born, the liberal-bourgeois age from 1870 to 1914, yesterday’s world? Historicism replies: Does not attributing definitive importance to a certain historical event as if it marked the break between a past and a future – an attribution that distinguishes revolutionary thought – imply already accepting the presupposition of the philosophy of history, the claim to encompass the totality of reality, as if all facts were already given? In order to solve this problem, we must look at it from the standpoint of the primacy of action that is proper to the revolutionary philosophy of history. We must not reason as if the philosophy of history, also in the revolutionary sense, maintained its contemplative character, relating to action as a guarantee that reality will necessarily ensure its success, regardless of the obstacles it may encounter and the partial defeats it may experience, as an antidote to possible despair. From the standpoint of the primacy of action, the future that revolutionary philosophy talks about is a near future, the only future we can make; it is the future measured by what it is possible for us to make. The course of history will certainly continue after this reality that is to be created now – whose

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result will be not the total uprooting of evil and error but the disappearance of “ideologies” and “false consciousnesses”; socialism is not the ultimate end of history – which seems absolute to us only because it is the only historical task that is possible for us. It is certainly rigorously correct that this revolutionary philosophy expresses faith and hope, but this is natural because revolutionary philosophy is not part of theoretical philosophy but, rather, coincides with moral philosophy. Nor does it absorb within itself the history of philosophy because its ability to explain it is the only theoretical criterion of its validity. Undoubtedly, there is a direction of history because it is impossible to conceive a revolutionary action without rationalist optimism; but we can grasp it only as the direction of current history, the history that we have to create, excluding any consideration of the ultimate end (of the “end of times”) because that would bring us back to the theology of history. The historicist objection can renew itself by taking the following form: “revolutionary thought” does not belong to philosophy, just like “Christian philosophy” according to Bréhier (in fact, according to Bréhier, who was a pure rationalist precisely because of this double exclusion, both of them did not) and for the same fundamental reason: revolutionary thought is “theological,” just like “Christian philosophy” although in a different sense. In order to respond, we have to ask ourselves whether the process through which Marxism replaces the Hegelian type of the philosopher with the type of the revolutionary has a philosophical character; that is, whether it expresses the most profound distillation of Hegel’s novelty, meaning the only way in which Hegelianism can reaffirm itself (for my answer, see pages 190ff, 222ff). It seems to me that this is proven by the defeat of the attempt to surpass Marxism within Hegelianism, which is precisely Italian neo-Hegelianism. I do not need to present here for the nth time the process that made clear that Croce’s “non-definitiveness” of philosophy was, in an indirect way, the consecration to an absolute model of a specific historical period. And I do not need repeat that the development of Croce’s philosophy from the period of the “philosophy of distincts” to that of the “philosophy of freedom” just brought to light the original presupposition: reconciliation with the reality of the age – in the guise of enlightened and liberal conservatism, which also marks the overcoming of his initial youthful pessimism – in which we must recognize the result of his criticism of Marxism. Marxism had appropriated a theme of

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counter-revolutionary thought, the critique of the abstractness of iusnaturalism. As a consequence of the criticism of Marxism, Croce rediscovered this approach in its anti-Jacobin and anti-revolutionary aspect, and this was the source of the constant theme of his politics, his opposition to progressivist radicalism (what else is the meaning, for example, of his friendship with Sorel?). Gentile’s response that the concept of praxis has an Idealist character still seems to hold out better; however, this thesis has the result of highlighting, by antithesis, the primary original intuition of Marxism, the unity – in a position of thought founded on the identity of freedom and necessity, and on the negation of free will – between materialism (identified with realism) and philosophy of action. Does not the invincibility of the criticism that Actualism is solipsistic seem to confirm such intuition? Here we touch upon a crucial point for the problem of realism: whether the affirmation of realism as distinct from materialism is possible only by rediscovering (on this one must read the splendid pages in Laporte’s Conscience de la liberté) the theory of free will, a term people rarely dare to use out of terror of Spinoza’s criticisms, which are actually quite weak. But evidently we cannot linger on this problem now. I will insert here an important incidental comment: Does the concept of philosophy of history make sense only within an immanentist conception, or can it also make sense within a philosophy of transcendence?95 This question is extremely important because, if we granted that in reference to any religious conception in the transcendent sense we can only speak of theology of history, we ought to exclude Vico, in his novel aspect, from the Christian philosophical tradition; the implications of this for a critique of the interpretation of modern philosophy as a process of secularization are explained in essay VI. Indeed, a Catholic interpretation of Vico certainly cannot but view him as the theoretician of a philosophy of history, which is not a theology of history, even though it presupposes a theological interpretation of the Fall, and which, at the same time, is not liable at all to turn into historicism – as

95 It is known that the question of the legitimacy of the philosophy of history, as distinct from theology, is very controversial among Catholic thinkers. Among those who support its legitimacy we must remember Maritain, Pour une philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,1959). Among its irreducible enemies is Padovani, in whom perhaps this negation represents the link between the legacy of the teaching of Marinetti, his teacher, and Catholic thought.

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the affirmation that history is the only reality – nor then to surpass historicism by transitioning into the philosophy of history, in the Marxist sense that I have described. Now, my response is that in a Catholic conception, which does not view the Fall as a radical perversion, philosophy of history as autonomous from theology of history has its own legitimacy and addresses a necessary question, that of defining what man can do in the state of fallen nature (see page 409). Therefore, given what has been said, a Catholic conception of history must see in Vico the beginning of the process that can lead to a rigorous critique of Marxism. We also come to this conclusion by reflecting on the fact that the only philosophy that formed with Marxism as its essential adversary, Croce’s, was led to reaffirm Vico after Hegel. Are we not authorized to think that a return to Vico is a necessary process in the criticism of Marxism, even if it failed in the form Croce gave it? But let us now go back to the philosophical character of Marxist thought. Since such character seems no longer in question after what has been indicated by the defeat of Italian neo-Hegelianism, we can move on and define the unique feature that marks it in the entire history of thought: it is modern philosophy in the aspect in which it presents itself as secular (i.e., as surpassing transcendent thought), which becomes a religion. Consider, in fact: a revolutionary is somebody who reaches the masses, not in the sense that he knows how to move them with irrational motivations but in the sense that he expresses the thought or matches the expectation that are immanent in them. And a revolutionary in the total sense is somebody who carries out a revolution whose outcome is not dominance by a class – a revolution that, therefore, can no longer be just partial, or political, or bourgeois but, rather, must be total, or social, or proletarian. We know that Marx’s thought is the endpoint of the interpretation of the French Revolution as an unfinished revolution. Let us leave aside now a very important problem that, to my knowledge, has never been discussed: the outcome of revolutions in the theological sense I explained earlier is to give rise not to freedom and universal equality but to regimes of social classes. Thus the French Revolution leads to the dominance of the bourgeois class  – we know the perfect sentence by Talleyrand on the reign of Louis Philippe as its conclusion – while the Russian Revolution seems to lead to the dominance of the technobureaucratic class. Let us also observe that this type of dominance is the unexpected result of revolutions. It certainly was not the goal of the French revolutionaries and of their most determined expression,

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the Jacobin trend; nor could I say for sure that the thought that prepared it – the Enlightenment’s revolutionary line – was an expression of the bourgeoisie. We have to wonder whether social classes explain history or, rather, whether their dominance is the outcome of movements inspired by the idea of replacing religion with politics for liberation from evil – that is, by revolutionary thought. Next let us observe that a worldview that reaches the masses in the sense I described makes itself a religion; and that in Marxism’s case it is Hegelianism that, developed to its utmost consistency, reaches the masses. I do not mean this in the sense of Hegelianism adapted to the masses, like the science for all of the positivist popularizations; the only possible parallel is with Christianity, and this is where their similar character of being religions that cannot be surpassed by transitioning into a philosophy that “demythologizes” them becomes apparent. Communist catechisms, like the Catholic ones, make the doctrine accessible to the masses without substantial deformations and, above all, prepare them for the action that the doctrine requires. The stance of the philosopher who goes beyond the point of view of the masses is replaced by that of the philosopher who conforms to their movement – that is, to the movement of history – and explicates its meaning. Let me insist on the unique feature: previous, or even subsequent, forms of rationalism always presented themselves as going beyond religion – which was reduced to a representation of the truth in symbolic form, or to a purely practical position that theoretical thought must exclude – and as detaching themselves from the masses precisely on this point. So, in the transition, motivated by the nature of philosophy, from philosophy to religion Marxism inverts the direction of modern rationalism, reaching at the same time the completely opposite position to that of Christian thought (in which philosophy is justified starting from the characterization of faith as quaerens intellectum). Regarding politics, those positions presented themselves either as the foundations of an eternal model that politicians must imitate or as the awareness of a historical process (e.g., Hobbes of absolutism, Locke of the transition to liberalism, Hegelianism as the awareness of universal history, Italian Hegelianism as the awareness of the Risorgimento, etc.). The inversion takes place because Marxism is characterized by being a philosophy ante factum and not a philosophy post factum like Hegelianism. Whereas Hegel could see in Napoleon the world-soul, and Croce could see in Giolitti – possibly the greatest adversary of political philosophy that ever

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existed – the ideal statesman of the age of distincts 1870–1914, which he regarded as a model, neither Hegel nor Croce could think that Napoleon or Giolitti had consciously enacted their philosophies. Conversely, it is not possible to conceive of a Communist politician who is not conscious of Marxist doctrine, and his practical errors will be attributed to theoretical errors in its interpretation. Let us remark en passant that this observation could be extremely important for the history of Machiavellianism. Indeed, does not Machiavelli’s rehabilitation by “virtuous” philosophers, and no longer only by “libertines” or by controversial politicians like Bacon, coincide with the history of metaphysical rationalism, from Spinoza to Hegel?96 And above all, is it coincidental that it reaches its climax in Croce’s rationalism – which is apparently historicist but is actually metaphysical and secular-Christian – that is, in the only philosophy that formed having Marx constantly in mind as its essential adversary? In fact, how can rationalism think of reaching political reality if not Machiavellically, by regarding religions as practically useful forces? From what we have established, several extremely important consequences follow: 1. For Marxism, philosophy, since it is purely rational, can make itself a religion only in the form of rigorous atheism. Indeed, if transcendent religion contained its own perennial truth expressed in the guise of “representation,” it should be preserved within philosophy. The philosopher’s task would become, in Hegelian fashion, to look for the counterpart of the representation in terms of thought. Therefore, he would end up again surpassing religion by transitioning into philosophy, and thus thought would move from religion to philosophy rather than from philosophy to religion. But the preservation of religion within philosophy also implies the detachment of the philosopher from the masses, and this leads to a lived contradiction because the philosopher finds himself forced into an aristocratic position that makes it impossible for him to communicate with the

96 We can find a punctual confirmation of my assertion in the excellent works by A. Ravà, “Spinoza e Machiavelli,” in Studi filosofico-giuridici dedicati a Giorgio Del Vecchio, vol. 2 (Modena: Società tipografica modenese,1930–31) and Studi su Spinoza e Machiavelli (Milan: Giuffrè, 1958), which is a fairly rare example of a perfectly executed study of Machiavelli’s fortune with philosophers.

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masses and, therefore, leads him to justify the Machiavellian ­disposition towards them and, therefore, to deny their humanity – which is the vital aspect of religion, the affirmation of human ­universality. Hence we see that in Marxism religion and atheism are linked so tightly that weakening the atheistic aspect coincides with weakening the religious aspect and, thus, the ethical aspect since, in the case of Marxism, there is no “autonomous morality.” Therefore we have to say that Marxism contains this aspect of truth: given the initial negation of the supernatural, religion, as life, can only ­reaffirm itself as radical atheism. Given the hypothesis, this ­affirmation is absolutely undeniable. 2. By becoming religion, philosophy takes the appearance of liberating truth. The Marxist philosophy of history makes itself a religion in as much as it presents itself as an agonistic form of thought against the justificatory form of Hegelian thought, viewed implicitly as the final aspect taken on by religion reduced to a form of “theodicy.”97 But this liberation is entirely worldly, historical, and social; hence the identity of religion and politics; hence the particular idea of revolution (about which see pages 295–8), whose genesis is not explained by a reminiscence of Judeo-Christian eschatology but by being the endpoint of the Enlightenment’s rehabilitation of human nature. Thus, in Marx the fullness of Hegelianism coincides with the fullness of 97 The concept of theodicy  – in a proper sense, as the justification of God in front of Reason, conceived as an absolute norm, so that there is a separation, however dissimulated, of God’s Will from his Wisdom, and a dependence of the former on the latter – is correlated with theological rationalism, which I distinguished (see note 106 on page 391) from metaphysical rationalism. The true beginning of this theological rationalism must be recognized in the thought of Malebranche; hence, the exceptional importance of the polemic between Arnauld and Malebranche because of the correct perception that Arnauld, who is a Jansenist because he is a traditionalist, has of the novelty, as a departure from the whole theological tradition, of the thesis of the Oratorian philosopher. Despite the decline that the idea of theodicy, thus understood, represents with respect to religious thought, we must distinguish two stages: the theodicy linked with Ontologism in Malebranche, and in a certain sense in Leibniz, and the theodicy of the moment when theological rationalism meets metaphysical rationalism and is transfigured by it. At this moment, which is Hegel’s thought, there is absolute opposition between the justificatory and the agonistic aspects of religious thought, and the second is recovered by Marx. Perhaps we can say: the sublation of religion into philosophy in Hegel had to be matched in Marx by a philosophy that makes itself religion in the guise of agonistic thought.

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the Enlightenment’s demand for active rationality, capable of ­transforming the world. 3. The idea of revolution loses all meaning unless history is thought to be meaningfully oriented, even in the limited sense I mentioned earlier. Hence the ethics of the “direction of history” or, so to speak – and the formula is perfectly correct – the replacement of ethics by the philosophy of history; hence the concept of “attributed” responsibility (we are made responsible by history); hence totalitarianism (essay VII). 4. In light of these three points, we can understand in all its significance the positive and political character of Marxist atheism in its total break from the earlier form of negative atheism. We can also understand its appropriation of the idea of the City of God (of Totality, in the language of a certain type of recent Marxism), its self-presentation as the condition to realize a new civilization, to radically transform the world.

It is at this point that we can account for the parallels we observed earlier between Marxism and biblical thought. They occur not because Marxism must be explained on the basis of a category of prophetic and messianic thought foreign to philosophy but because in the domain of religion it is the exact antithesis of Christianity. From this we could also draw an apologetic suggestion: the radical antithesis of Christianity, “atheistic religion,” is necessarily compelled to transcribe Christian figures, in an immanentistic sense. Now, we can wonder whether the criticisms that anti-clericalism addressed, wrongly, against the Catholic Church do not apply exactly to this transcription. We see here my complete opposition to Löwith’s thesis.98 The philosophy of history is not a mere evolution of chiliasm, or a contradictory 98 Actually, Löwith’s thought is conditioned, as always, by that of Nietzsche  – viewed as the insuperable endpoint of the philosophy of the dissolution of Hegelianism (but I already said that in this philosophy we must recognize two opposite and irreducible processes, that from Hegel to Marx, and that from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche) – and by his critique of the Christianity in disguise of the nineteenth century (in the form of humanitarianism, philosophy of history, etc.). In fact, the idea that the philosophy of history is a contradictory secularized form of the theology of history is typically Nietzschean. This acceptance of the Nietzschean perspective leads him in Meaning in History to write a chapter on Marx that is essentially wrong. Léopold Flam (“Etudes sur Marx,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 45–6 [1958]: 318–65),

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contamination of secular thought with chiliasm. Rather, the fact that it meets chiliasm, Christian heresy, in this form (like Hegelianism meets, in a certain sense, gnostic Christianity, and religious anti-clericalism – in the sense I described, as a continuation of Kant’s religious thought – meets the Cathar heresy) means simply that an element of Christianity is preserved-surpassed in modern philosophy (i.e., its historical character).

after pointing out that Capital itself has a philosophical rather than an economic meaning, correctly sees Löwith’s mistake in placing “Marx within the perspective of the doctrine of Judeo-Christian salvation, so that socialism takes the appearance of  ‘God’s earthly kingdom.’ This completely fails to recognize the orientation of Marxist thought … it is precisely because he wanted to separate completely history from myth that [Marx] made recourse to political economy. Capitalism creates the fetishism of implacable destiny; suppressing it will mean putting an end to every form of fatalist thought and give back to man the awareness that he builds his own history” (363). However, I cannot agree with Flam’s apparent negation of every interpretation of Marxism of a religious kind. The flaw of Löwith’s interpretation is that he thinks that this religious character follows from the illegitimate transposition into a form of secular thought of a perspective valid only within theological thought, whereas it is, instead, a religion reached thought the reaffirmation-reformation of Hegel, which leads to the rediscovery and preservation in a new form of messianic thought. Viewed from his general perspective, Löwith’s insertion into modern philosophy (which he still understands as a process of secularization  – see his assessment of Descartes in “Il ‘Discorso della montagna’ anticristiano di Nietzsche” in the volume on Pascal e Nietzsche in Archivio di filosofia 3 [1962]: 108–9, and see above all of the chapter on Vico in Meaning in History, where his Protestant picture of Christian thought leads him essentially to accept the secular interpretation of Vico because of his character as a “philosopher of history”) of the period from Hegel to Nietzsche, with the thesis that Nietzsche is insuperable, cannot but draw him to the consequent thesis that the history of thought takes two irreducible forms, that which concludes in radical atheism and that marked by the primacy of Pistis. Which one Löwith’s espouses is not easy to discern, or at least one notices his extreme perplexity (today he seems oriented towards a Greek type of “cosmological” and “cyclical” position). His case seems exemplary to me in order to legitimate the position of the problem whether the interpretation of the history of modern philosophy as a process of secularization is adequate. Not having posed it is what has bogged down Löwith’s thought since the time of his major work From Hegel to Nietzsche. In comparison to it, his subsequent works look not like a development but an extension – and not always a very successful one, like the work I cited on the philosophy of history – of the thesis of that work to the examination of partial aspects.

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5. For Marxism, understood as the outcome of secular modern philosophy, the fullness of Hegelianism coincides with the convergence, as a consequence of the extreme radicalization of their aspect of truth, of philosophical trends that are commonly viewed as different or opposite: •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

historicism, separated from its directly or indirectly conservative aspect; the Enlightenment in its intention to bring about a renewal, but ­separated both from the aspect of vulgar materialism, which made its critique purely dissolutive and gave rise to an aristocratic position (consider how deep is Robespierre’s sentence about his century’s atheism: “atheism is aristocratic”), and from the iusnaturalistic aspect; Feuerbach’s humanism, but separated from the Stirnerian outcome and from anarchism, and from the subsequent possibility of a rebirth of the religious philosophy of existence; positivism, since experimentalism is affirmed as a fundamental ­requirement, but separated from the aspect that leads (already in Comte, and then in Taine) to the reactionary form of sociologism as well as from the spiritualist antithesis that develops within p­ositivism itself; pragmatism, because practice is made the criterion of truth, but ­separated from all spiritualistic aspects;99 criticism, freed from everything in Kant that had made possible the reaffirmation of metaphysical thought in German Idealism and in spiritualist Kantism; neo-criticism in the form of historicism, as critique of the Idealist ­formulation of the history of philosophy but freed from relativism, which pushes it towards irrationalism; utopianism (regarding the aspect common to all its forms, the ­critique of the idea of property) and what historically has been its antithesis, Machiavellian political realism, are reconciled precisely by being made extreme since their opposition was based on the old idea of ethics; religion itself is preserved as messianism entirely separated from all aspects whereby it must present itself as theodicy.

99 Lenin, Quaderni filosofici (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969), 433, 456-8 [TN: Philosophical Notebooks, vol. 38 of Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 438–9, 454–6].

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Reconciliation is achieved through extreme radicalization, and thus it is the opposite of eclecticism, whereas according to Marxism every form of spiritualism is necessarily eclectic, and every one of the forms I listed is susceptible, without the Marxist sublation, to a spiritualistic extension. Therefore this radicalization consists in eliminating from these trends every element that might be the occasion for a religious opening in the transcendent sense, or that creates an occasion to reaffirm such form of religious thought. At the same time, it coincides with the distinction between progressive philosophies and reactionary philosophies, which must not be understood as a mere replacement of a veritative criterion with a political criterion in the interpretation of the history of philosophy. This is because Marxism intends to extract and preserve from every form of thought from the past what represented the image of the movement of history, separating it from what tied those philosophies to a given order that was presented as definitive. By virtue of absolute historicism, of the affirmation that history is the only reality, the terms “progressivereactionary” include the terms “critical-dogmatic” and express their true meaning. In relation to the movement of history, Marxism claims to realize the program of modern philosophy by uniting rationalism (negation of the supernatural) and an entirely secularized Christian anthropology as affirmation of man’s transcendence with respect to nature. In short, by satisfying both these requirements, it claims to be a radical humanism. 6. We must add, though (and it is a decisive point, whose importance will be discussed later), that in secular modern philosophy there is only one position that is absolutely irreducible to the Marxist and cannot be surpassed by it – Nietzsche’s thought. It is almost certain that Nietzsche never read one single page by Marx or Engels; ­nonetheless, and this is the paradox, his thought cannot be explained except in terms of a radical, completely insuperable, opposition to Marxist thought. I would like to say more an ­opposition to Marxism than to Christianity, but I will hold back, ­because although this is true in the sense I just stated, of “greatest distance,” it can lead to misunderstandings (Scheler, Shestov, etc.) about its possible Christianization.

Whereas the perspective I have presented defends Marxism from  the  objections of philosophers, its practical character (the

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negation-realization of philosophy) leads it to establish as the ultimate criterion of truth a historical outcome – namely, the revolution not as an idea but as a real event, which must bring about the disappearance of the classes and world unification. Obviously – but apparently not too obviously for the majority of non-Marxist people who write about Marxism – it is not a matter of affirming from the theoretical standpoint the unity of theory and praxis but, rather, of realizing a philosophy whose link with practical politics is absolutely indispensable and that loses all its validity apart from this verification. This is the point that was recognized with absolute clarity for the first time by Lenin. It defines his place in history and explains his judgment: “nobody after Marx, among Marxist themselves, has understood this.” However, there is a possible objection against this claim, and its crucial importance will be pointed out shortly. Is Lenin truly Marx’s heir? Must we say, using the words of Lukàcs from 1923, that the effectiveness of Lenin’s political work is due to “his greatness, profundity and fertility as a theoretician. His effectiveness rests on the fact that he has developed the practical essence of Marxism to a pitch of clarity and concreteness never achieved before. He has rescued this aspect of Marxism from an almost total oblivion and by virtue of this theoretical action he has once again placed in our hands the key to a right understanding of Marxist method”?100 Or must we accept the more recent, antithetical view of Sidney Hook (and, in fact, of many others)?

9. Contemporary History as Philosophical History All of the above has an extremely important consequence, which is generally not recognized, or, in any case, is very seldom adequately expressed. Indeed, if Marx’s thought is genuinely philosophical, we must take literally his sentence stating that his conception is that of a philosophy that becomes world (which surpasses itself by pursuing political realization and finds its verification therein) as opposed to that of a 100 György Lukács, Histoire et consience de classe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1960), 10 [History and Class Consciousness, xlii]. We can see in this book the rigorous development of the sentence by Engels about the proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy. But Lenin also, as I will discuss shortly, had the exact same vision of Marxism.

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world that becomes philosophy. If, furthermore, contemporary history is the history of the expansion of Marxism, it takes a new character, different from all previous history, especially after the Renaissance. It is not just history that can be comprehended by the philosopher; it is history made by the philosopher because, for Marx, the value of thought is that of establishing the conditions for effective action aimed at transforming society and the world. Therefore contemporary history is philosophical history. This novelty implies that thinking the historical actuality must be today the first question of philosophical research;101 it also implies the revision of all traditional political categories because, in the new philosophical-political context, they take new meanings compared to those they could be given based on a consideration of so-called “modern history,” from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the beginning of the First World War. This change of meaning is particularly sharp for the essential political category of the modern world, that of “liberalism,” as I try to outline in essay VII. This point is extremely important because certain habits that made sense for the period from 1870 to 1914 – the age of “distincts” par excellence, and the period that, because of this character, is, of all historical periods, exactly the farthest removed from the current one – are still common, both among philosophers and politicians. I certainly do not want to pile criticisms on Croce; today they are definitely not in good taste. But how can we fail to recall the impression we had at the time of his death, that his passing marked the passing of a world that had reached in him its full and serene (Croce as Goethe!) self-awareness? Nor has he become relevant again. To those who will reproach me for linking too tightly political discourse and philosophical discourse, I simply have to respond that this follows from having taken seriously Marx’s philosophical thought. In fact, is there any non-pragmatic proof of Marxism? “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e., the reality and power … – of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (2nd Thesis on Feuerbach). This implies that the study of Marxism as a philosophy is inseparable from that of 101 On this topic I refer the reader to the book by Fr Gaston Fessard, De l’actualité historique. It is a model of philosophical-theological analysis of the present reality and a truly insuperable critique of Catholic progressivism from within.

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its historical result, Communism as a political reality. It also implies that when we evaluate any contemporary philosophy we cannot do it without considering its capacity to take a stance with respect to Marxism. Why is this point of view generally ignored? Because the specific character of Marxist atheistic religion, in the sense of philosophy that makes itself religion, has not been correctly understood. The most disparate schools of thought, from Idealism to sociologism, agree in describing it as a “revolutionary myth.” I think we must respond that the idea of Revolution, as replacement of speculative philosophy with the philosophy of praxis, arises through a strictly philosophical process, even though it cannot reach reality except in mythical form. This happens not because the revolutionary must use myths in order to communicate his truth to spirits who are still incapable of understanding scientific truth in its purity but because of an internal contradiction of revolutionary thought, which forces it to abandon the perspective of truth and to identify what is true with what is practically effective, with what is capable of intensifying life. You can see the extreme importance of this problem, which concerns the rebirth of myth after the “age of reason,” and raises the question whether rationalism, pushed to its extreme consequences, brings about the age of ideological myths. My thinking, and I will briefly discuss it later, is that the transition from the Revolution as truth to the Revolution as myth takes place in Lenin – unawares, though, because this transition to myth was the only way in which the revolutionary substance of Marxism could be affirmed. But, of course, now I cannot present such an argument, which is extremely complex. Let this hint be enough, together with the overall statement of my thesis: the transition to the mythical awareness is the decay of a strictly philosophical process, that which leads to the elaboration of the idea of Revolution, which reached its fullness in Marx. Therefore the current idea of an “age of ideological myths” does not at all contradict the idea that contemporary history is a philosophical history.

1 0 . T h e G r e at e s t M i s ta k e When Interpreting Marxism, and Its Consequences According to the viewpoint I have proposed, radical atheism, as the endpoint of rationalism, is the key to Marx’s whole work. His thought, viewed as genuinely philosophical, is organic to such a degree that no

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“part” can be detached (his sociology, for instance, as if it were amenable to be interpreted apart from the reference to atheism). However, I know well that in this regard I stand apart from many interpreters. At this point I must define the greatest mistake a scholar of Marxism can incur (and it is a curious fact that almost everybody does incur it), and the sequence of philosophical and political positions that follow from it. It has the effect of spoiling the interpretation of all of contemporary history and also of preventing the correct position of the philosophical question as it necessarily presents itself to us today. This happens because this mistake makes us miss the absolutely new character of the current historical situation. The mistake can be formulated as follows: for Marx the critique of religion “already happened,” and about this “reduction of theology to anthropology” he did not say anything more than Feuerbach had said. He accepted uncritically that perspective “out of anti-clericalism,” but his interest focuses entirely on the critique of capitalist society, motivated by ethical reasons, by the ethics on which all moralists and all men practically agree.102 102 This mistake can be observed even in the works of truly preeminent scholars. For example, when reading the extremely valuable book by Fr Henri De Lubac, Le drame de l’humanisme athée, one cannot help being surprised by the huge importance it attributes to Feuerbach’s atheism, to the point of tracing back to it not just Marx’s atheism but even those of Comte and Nietzsche: “We have seen the success that Karl Marx was to secure for his master’s humanism by founding the communist movement above it” (Drama of Humanistic Atheism, 135; see also 35–7). Feuerbach’s enduring influence on Marxism is emphasized here; however, it is still true that if the atheism of Marx is reduced to that of Feuerbach it becomes possible to separate from atheism a sociological and political part of his work. Since confusing Feuerbach’s and Marx’s atheisms is, in my judgment, a huge mistake, one should study how much this general consideration of atheism burdened De Lubac’s whole work (it certainly burdened his evaluation of Proudhon in Proudhon et le Christianisme). The consequences of this separation between the philosophical part of Marxist thought – understood as a messianic transfiguration of Feuerbachism – and its sociological part must be recognized in two recent Catholic works, by Fr P. Bigo, Marxisme et Humanisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957) and by A. Piettre, Marx et le Marxisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). Considering only Bigo’s book, it seems to me that it suffers from a confusion between a theoretical perspective and a historical perspective. The fact that a few isolated economic theses of Marx may be accepted and justified from the point of view of natural law, understood in the Thomist sense, does not mean that such an idea of natural law underlies Marx’s work, even in combination with other elements, which of course Bigo opposes. Once the philosophical moment of Marxism has been

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I already criticized this view of the Feuerbach-Marx relationship in my 1948 essay, reprinted here (see pages 224ff), highlighting the aspect of Marx’s thought that makes it a reaffirmation of Hegel after Feuerbach. Here, I add: 1. Marx’s philosophy must be considered completely independently of that of Feuerbach, of which he actually accepts nothing, no matter how stimulating the suggestions he received from it may have been. His philosophy cannot manifest itself as effective politics except by making itself a necessarily atheistic religion, a step that is entirely missing in Feuerbach. 2. What characterizes Feuerbach is the unity of atheistic humanism and the Enlightenment. See Marx’s criticism expressly against his Enlightenment mindset: “Feuerbach starts out from the fact of ­religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the ­religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis ­detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and selfcontradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be ­destroyed in theory and in practice” (IV Thesis on Feuerbach). In other words, it is not the “light” shed by the criticism of religion that makes transcendent religion disappear but, rather, a revolution that reaches and eliminates its real roots. There is no greater possible misunderstanding than establishing a relationship first of all of ­continuity between Feuerbach and Marx, whereas the continuity is secondary with respect to the opposition. Feuerbach and Marx are reduced to that of Feuerbach, adopted out of anti-clericalism, what naturally follows is the tendency, which is very widespread among Catholic scholars, to exaggerate the importance of the moral character of Marx’s reaction against capitalism, which supposedly emerged, even if unawares, because of the traditional moral values and then was altered by being rethought in terms of Hegelian philosophy. Another mistake due to forgetfulness of the specific character of Marxist atheism is that made by a very well-informed scholar of Social Democratic orientation, M. Rubel [Karl Marx (Paris: Rivière, 1957)], who, like the Catholic authors I cited, begins by distinguishing an ethical moment and a sociological moment in Marxist thought.

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in fact two autonomous and clearly distinct thinkers. The thought of the former constitutes the necessary philosophical form that the Enlightenment must take in order to reaffirm itself after Hegel; Marx’s thought in The German Ideology and the Theses is the reaffirmation of Hegel against the Feuerbachian deterioration. What is extremely important to emphasize here is that for Marx atheistic existentialism and the Enlightenment are surpassed simultaneously.103 Herein lies the ­ultimate reason one cannot expect … to surpass Marxism starting from these two positions, or from their union, which, as we have seen, had already become realized over a century ago. It does not matter that today the union of existentialism and the Enlightenment has presented itself in a new form, as the antithesis, on the one hand, to the inclusion of Kierkegaardism in the tradition of French religious philosophy and, on the other hand, to the neo-criticist form in which the Enlightenment tradition had continued in Brunschvicg. 3. As for the suppression of atheism in socialism that Marx often talks about (for the first time in a letter to Ruge of 20 November 1842), it means that full atheism does not consist in the atheistic answer to the question of God but in the suppression of the question of God. This will be possible only when the need for God will have vanished because of the full realization of man. That is, full atheism, as the ­affirmation of humanity without any trace of God, will be made possible only by the social revolution. In other words, for Marx atheism as full humanism is a result in the same fashion as Hegel’s Absolute. In this sense, where Marx goes beyond Feuerbach is in the rediscovery of revolutionary thought – and notice that the association of revolution and atheism is the solution to a problem, not a given that Marx accepted, because in the Enlightenment the idea of revolution was affirmed by the deist Rousseau, not by the Enlightenment’s atheists. 4. But what will be the content of this revolution since, obviously, it ­cannot refer to ethical (in the traditional sense) and natural law principles? Evidently it will be the new idea of social man as the ­precise antithesis to the Christian idea. Such an idea implies a relation between ethics and politics, and a conception of individual 103 I have already said that the expression “atheistic existentialism” can be applied to Feuerbach only improperly; but it is true nonetheless that the recent forms of atheistic existentialism, in their humanistic aspect, realize one of the possibilities of Feuerbachism [TN: in the original this footnote is a parenthetical statement].

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freedom that is completely antithetical both to the Christian and to the Kantian (202). But the idea of “social man” is tied (see pages 196ff, where I present synthetically – but non incorrectly, I believe – the logical sequence) to integral materialism (to materialism after Idealism). Thus, for Marxism revolution and integral materialism are inseparably united. 5. Besides, the proof that Feuerbach’s and Marx’s positions are ­distinct is provided by the entirely non-Marxist trends that link back to Feuerbach: humanitarianism; eroticism (I do not know if anybody ever regarded Feuerbach as one of D.H. Lawrence’s precursors, and yet many passages by both demonstrate this connection, at least de jure, even if there was no influence de facto); scientistic materialism in its typical character, whereby it distinguishes itself from positivism; existentialism as humanistic atheism. Furthermore, I already ­mentioned the fact that his true critical extension is in Stirner and the possibility of surpassing Stirner through Kierkegaard. Therefore, while Feuerbach must be considered an independent thinker from Marx, it is not true that he is, from a critical standpoint, a terminal moment of atheistic thought.

Let us try and rigorously enumerate the positions I have mentioned: i. ii.

iii. iv. v.

The current form of spiritualist academicism, characterized by the loss of the “politics of culture.”104 The anti-Communist sociological critique, in as much as it replaces the problem of the relationship between “the philosophy of Marx and the political reality of Communism” with the problem of “Communism as an object of sociology.” Soviet dialectic materialism. Social Democracy in all its forms. Catholic progressivism (neo-modernism) and secular progressivism.

104 The definition of “politics of culture” has been illustrated with exemplary clarity by Norberto Bobbio in Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1955). See therein also the perfect definition of the a-politicity of recent academicism (35). However, Bobbio’s ideas regarding the continuity between the Enlightenment (and liberalism) and Marxism are different from mine, as we shall see.

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vi. Neo-positivism and psychoanalysis (in the form in which they ­present themselves as scientific solutions to ethical and religious problems). vii. Atheistic existentialism.

Academicism. It is easy to establish a parallel between Feuerbach and Kierkegaard, and to show the latter’s great superiority. Having done this, if follows that a spiritualist philosopher, since he cannot fail to notice the invasive reality of atheism, must take into consideration as the authentic forms of atheism those by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – since they proceed from Heidegger’s secularization of Kierkegaard, with Husserl as mediator – given that in philosophy Marx said nothing more than what had already been said by Feuerbach. Moreover, since Heidegger himself rejected them, the spiritualist philosopher must seek today’s true formulation of religious philosophy in a continuation of the second Heidegger – whether or not the new form of his thought constitutes an explication of what was already intrinsic in the first – and measure the entire philosophical and theological tradition by its compatibility with Heidegger and Husserl.105 In light of this we understand why the other philosophers of existence of the 1930s have been forgotten: Berdaev, Lavelle, Le Senne, Marcel, and Jaspers himself. How many books that follow this outline have appeared in the last few years? Can we say that they have achieved much, apart from their expository usefulness? Above all, did they lead to true historical judgments? This position corresponds to the first of the four forms, which I listed earlier, in which secular thought has defined today’s possible ways of expression of Catholic thought. Sociological Anti-Communism. It is characterized by two initial judgments: (1) today’s adversary is Communism because it is totalitarianism and (dissimulated) imperialism, while Fascism and Nazism no longer have any chance of coming back; (2) the second judgment devalues Marx’s philosophy by reducing it to ideology, while recognizing the unity between the Marxist-Leninist 105 This, of course, also applies to theology itself, where it takes the form of compatibility with Bultmann.

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ideology and Communism. Therefore, the relationship between Marxist philosophy and Communism as a political reality is replaced by the study of Communism as an “object of sociology.”106 The reasons for this transition are clear from the perspective I have proposed. If Marxism truly enjoys the superiority I have described over the secular forms of modern thought (apart from Nietzsche, who is irreducible to Marxism but does not surpass it), such forms have only one way to respond to theoretical Marxism – that of excluding it from philosophical consideration. This is why it is easy to fall for the mistake of viewing the Soviet dialectic materialism that organized itself under Stalin, which truly is an ideological structure, as the authentic form of Marxism, while on the contrary it represents its decline as a consequence of that historical period of Communism. Or to fall for the mistake, which is only apparently the opposite, of viewing the theoretical Marxism of the nineteenth century and the one beginning with Lenin as altogether different positions (the European form and the Eastern form). This approach underpins the various works by Burnham (a consistent pupil of Trotsky, because he carries the Trotskyist critique to its effective conclusion, namely, the break not just with Stalinism but with Communism), by Hook (who tends towards neo-positivism), by Monnerot (whose work Sociologie du communisme may perhaps be considered the rigorous continuation for Communism of that written by Pareto on socialist systems), by Raymond Aron (who started from the critique of the philosophy of history by German historicism), by Arendt (a student of Jaspers and the author of the broadest investigation of totalitarianism that has appeared so far), all of which contain precious but inadequate elements. The proof of this inadequacy is the constant oscillation between a feeling of confidence about the inevitable defeat of Communism – because of the primitiveness of its secular religion and the backward character of its sociology and economics – and a feeling of despair because of the historical observation of its constant progress and because of its penetration (which is hard to explain from

106 It is a piquant observation that the man who started the rediscovery of the sociological mindset in Italy was precisely its greatest hater, Croce, because when he sensed, in 1937, a comeback of theoretical Marxism, he judged such Marxism to be worthy of study only from the point of view of its ideological power – which meant declaring it an object of study for sociologists, even if he did not pronounce that loathed word.

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this perspective) among the “hommes du seuil” (its function as “opium of the intellectuals”). In fact, by using the semantic critique in their toolbox sociologists may well think of annulling the truth value of an ideology but not its capacity to move people’s affective powers. Above all, they are not equipped to build ideological weapons sufficient for the fight because their critique is purely dissolutive and also because it is not possible to construct an ideology “for other people” in which its own authors do not believe. This because an ideology can certainly be used by political operatives who no longer believe in it; but it can only be born based on something in which one believes. This holds, as I will mention, even for the most clearly mythical ideology – the Nazi one. Thus, these sociologies of Communism yield merely a description of a crisis, and a description that is altered in two respects. First of all, they separate completely the political question of totalitarianism and of democracy from the question of atheism; it follows that the only possible explanation for the diffusion of atheism in the Western world must refer to technical development (on the erroneousness of this thesis, see essay IV). Furthermore, having lost sight of Marxism’s unique character as philosophy that makes itself religion, they are forced to explain the present situation through analogies with situations from the past. So, the Marxist “atheistic religion” becomes “secular religion” and, thereby, is characterized as a comeback, in the scientific age, of an elementary form of religious life, which can be studied by the methods that are valid for primitive religions.107 Thus, in totalitarianism – no longer linked with the philosophy that conditions it as a moral reality (the ethics of the direction of history and attributed responsibility) – they highlight generic organizational features that induce them to confuse its concept with other entirely different concepts like absolutism, dictatorship, personal state, Eastern despotism, possibly theocratic regime, and so on. Or they subsume under the common genus “totalitarianism” the species Communism, Nazism, and Fascism (truth be told, regarding Fascism today almost all sociologists agree about denying its authentically totalitarian character), forgetting that we can speak of totalitarianism about Communism and Nazism, but in completely opposite senses, since Nazism is totalitarian because it is completely subordinate to Communism in opposition, so as to be its irrationalistic translation. But

107 Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, passim.

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recognizing this is tantamount to saying that there is only one totalitarianism, which between 1935 and 1945 manifested itself with two opposite sides because, contra the Marxist prediction, class struggle did not replace the struggle between nations. Or, having granted the decisive character of ideal causality in contemporary history, it is also equivalent to saying that totalitarianism is the tragedy in which classical German philosophy finds its conclusion. In order to understand the sociologistic alteration, it is enough to consider some examples in Monnerot’s work, which in fact is very rich in qualities because of the correctness of many particular remarks, which can be given their full value from a philosophical perspective. In the Introduction that opens the recent new edition of his book (published in 1949), he writes: “The essence of Communism is defined here in terms of the mutual immanence and functional inter-dependence of three factors: an ‘empire’ (which pretends to be something else than an empire), a ‘secular religion’ (which pretends to be something else than a secular religion) and a ‘subversive organization of world-­ conquerors’ (which pretends to be something else than a subversive organization of world-conquerors).” As you can see, there is no mention of Marx’s philosophy. I will say that this characterization is perfectly correct as far as Stalin’s era is concerned and that everything suggests that Stalinism was not at all an episode but, rather, a stage in a necessary process of deterioration that continues today in different form, so that the characterization of 1949 remains valid in 1963. However, the Russian Revolution was started by Lenin. Is his physiognomy closer to that of Marx or to that of Stalin? It is not enough to say, like Monnerot does, that in Marx the figure of the philosopher is prevalent and in Lenin that of the revolutionary. This is undoubtedly true in the sense that Marx arrives at the idea of the Revolution through a philosophical process, while Lenin, after choosing the type of the revolutionary, arrives at recognizing in Marxism the possibility of bringing it to fulfilment. But we have to ask whether or not the type of the philosopher-politician thought by Marx was perfectly realized by Lenin. This is a question that Monnerot avoids, thinking that the negative answer is obvious; thus avoiding also the subsequent question, whether the subsequent dominance by the most perfect example of subordination of culture to politics, Stalin, may not be a coincidence at all. Then, perfectly correctly, he says that Communist ideology, understood as dialectical materialism in the Soviet form, marks a deviation with respect to Marxism. But

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should not this deviation be explained, given the particular Marxist relationship between philosophy and politics, by Stalin’s break between the philosopher and the politician, and the absolute prevalence of the latter? Very correctly, he says that Communism displays features that are the opposite with respect both to the age of distincts – the full desacralization of politics that started with Machiavelli – and to the Christian distinction of spiritual and temporal. But does this undeniable factual reality authorize him to understand the novelty of Communism through the analogy with Islam, or to characterize it merely in terms of the Eastern mindset, or even to compare his sacredness to that of the primitive mindset? And yet this comprehension of Marxism through analogies is necessary if one loses sight of its character as an atheistic religion. Using the same method of analogy, does it not feel like this attitude of the anti-Communist sociologists has some similarity with that of learned pagans towards Christianity? Scholastic Marxism Certainly it cannot but abide, verbally, by Engels’s judgment about Feuerbach. As a matter of fact, however, it is characterized by a form of scientistic materialism, which is exactly the legacy of one among the possible non-Marxist developments that befall Feuerbach’s thought when it refuses to be surpassed by Marxism: scientism on which dialectic is superimposed from the outside. In this way Marxism, which was fiercely hostile to eclecticism, transmogrifies into the greatest possible eclecticism, in parallel with its reduction to a mere instrument of political power. Which is exactly Marxism rethought from Stalin’s point of view. The problem it poses is the nature of and the reason for the Stalinist moment within the Marxist making-itself-world of philosophy. Social Democracy It is characterized in all its forms by the reduction of the atheism of Marx to that of Feuerbach. The following stances derive from this reduction: (a) it prefers, in its humanitarian-democratic-atheistic form, Feuerbach’s humanitarianism over Marxism’s scientific abstractness; (b) it seeks a conciliation between humanistic positivism and socialism based on Feuerbach’s philosophy, with Marxism providing the suitable social science to bring together the intellectual (along positivist lines)

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and material advancement of the proletariat. Consistently, in this position the ethical justification of socialism is sought in the positivist version of iusnaturalism, and the revolutionary aspect of Marxism is abandoned, taking Marx’s work as a “counsel of prudence” to revolutionaries in the name of “historical maturity.” Social Democracy is defined by aversion to Sorel’s thought as an attempt to reactivate the revolutionary spirit of Marxism by separating it from materialism and positivism, and Communism is viewed as falling into Sorelism. (c) However, if Feuerbach’s atheism and Marxist social science are two different things, it follows that Marxism can be re-understood and justified philosophically through other forms of thought (e.g., Kantian ethics); but then, why not also through any ethics that affirms the dignity of the human person? By this route one arrives at the position that is prevalent today, the philosophical and religious neutrality of Social Democracy. But such a position is inadequate because it fails to grasp the aspect of ideal causality of today’s history. Catholic and Secular Progressivism They share as a common starting point a historical judgment about the unity of Communists and non-Communists in the Resistance. Such unity is viewed as a factual reality that breaks the ideological, pseudo-­theological schemes that come between them, and that therefore demands to be continued in a revision of ideas. The Resistance is thus interpreted as a ideal unity and not as a factual unity against a common adversary,108 nor as a mere extension of the revolution of 1917, as orthodox Communists view it, but as a deepening of it. Now, reflecting on a revolution always implies a revision of one’s philosophical perspective; therefore, it is no wonder that we find this 108 Because Nazism, by presenting Germany as racially distinct and superior, had to take the form of colonialism pushed to the extreme consequences and, therefore, wage a war against the whole world, in which its allies had to figure as “the first defeated.” This is why the Second World War was taken to be a “World Revolution.” But actually this phrase, which was already circulating in 1939, is not accurate. What is true is that the Second World War realized to the highest degree the character of “world war.” I advanced this thesis already in the first issue of the journal Costume (January–March 1946). I find a confirmation of its truth in the fact that it was rediscovered and rigorously worked out – independently of any reference to that distant suggestion – by Sergio Cotta, in the journal Risorgimento (1961).

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historical judgment, in a determinant role, at the bottom of much of today’s culture. I already devoted the second of these essays to the necessary reduction of the atheism of Marx to that of Feuerbach in Catholic progressivism. But since this progressivism has endured, and in fact has spread enormously and has adopted a new phraseology, it is worth adding that, to cite formulas that are common today, Catholic progressives think of Marxism as a renewal of biblical metaphysics whose awareness has been blocked by the traditional confusion between Christianity and Platonism. Hence, the current task of Catholic culture is to elaborate a vision of the world and of history in which the Hebrew personalist and eschatological theme is completely freed from all the gnostic encrustations coming from Greek objectivist thought, thus making it possible to reintegrate the truth of Marxism. By virtue of this, adepts of Catholic progressivism perceive themselves to be the continuators of the work of St Thomas to Christianize Aristotelianism, which in his time seemed to be the war machine of the enemies of faith, like Marxism today. According to the extreme position, Catholic thought ought to Christianize the evolutionary conception of homo faber, just as ancient thought had Christianized the Greek idea of homo sapiens. Clearly here we enter true neo-modernism. In more moderate forms people speak of a “demythologization” of politics from ideologies, but the substance remains the same, no matter whether the assertions are moderate or extreme: Marxism is separate in principle from atheism and is accidentally tied to it because its messianic spirit (whose inspiration is essentially Christian) was not finding satisfaction in the prevalent Christian philosophies and theologies. These are, again, the misunderstandings that can be created by the imprecise statement that categorizes Marxism as the “last Christian heresy.” In the secular type of progressivism, the agreement between liberalism and Communism has to be pursued along the line of a new Enlightenment. This is simply because no continuity can be established between liberalism and Communism except through the Enlightenment. Therefore Marxism is re-comprehended within the Enlightenment, understood as a process of rationalization through science; in its first form (to which liberalism corresponds) of natural reality and in its second form (to which socialism generically understood, as including Communism, corresponds) of the social world. Such Enlightenment

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cannot have any other philosophy than a form of humanistic positivism because the scientific domination of the world presupposes man’s transcendence with respect to nature and, thus, a philosophy not of a metaphysical but of a methodological character, which includes a sociological explanation of metaphysical systems. Accordingly, Marx’s philosophy is simply set aside as a sort of transfiguration of Feuerbachism into a romantic, nineteenth-century-style philosophy of history. Then, considered historically, this humanistic neo-positivism is just a position that links back to Feuerbach, separating him from the aspects that can give rise to a philosophy of history. Neo-Positivism and Psychoanalysis It is clear that neo-positivism, at least to the extent that it intends to be more than just rigorous scientific methodology, presents itself as the liberation of old positivism from all the themes that could give rise to the rebirth of Idealism and spiritualism. But to do so it cannot but make recourse to a development of Feuerbach’s explanation of religion and metaphysics, fighting in Marxism, as non-scientific, the “theological” aspect of being an atheistic religion – which, once again, means ignoring the specific character of Marxist philosophy. As for psychoanalysis, in the aspect whereby it presents itself as science that wants to annihilate philosophy, clearly it is just a deterioration of authentic scientific investigations into scientistic materialism, whose Feuerbachian origins I have already mentioned. As for atheistic existentialism, as I already said, its line of development is Feuerbach-Stirner-Kierkegaard-Husserl as the condition to secularize Kierkegaard and Heidegger, understanding this latter as the philosopher of the tragic greatness of finitude without redemption. But since one has to exit tragedy if he wants to live – and let us not talk too much about greatness because lived tragedy means misery, not greatness – people look for a doctrine of action. Then the encounter with Marxism presents itself as necessary, but it is the necessity of a practical combination. Therefore the union of atheistic existentialism and Marxism is necessarily eclectic. Also in its regard, moreover, we must say that it is a replacement of Feuerbach’s old atheistic humanism with an extremely more refined form, for sure, but which still presupposes that Marx’s atheism coincides with Feuerbach’s.

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11. The Form of the Critical Power of Marxism It would certainly be extremely easy to write a book about the annihilating power of Marxism with regard to the secular cultural forms I just listed – in fact, too easy to justify that I undertake such work. I will just provide a few examples about what truly matters, and about which almost nothing has been written, the particular way in which this annihilation has taken place. Croce’s historicism has been the most important attempt at a complete liquidation of theoretical Marxism within a reform of Hegelian dialectic. The manner of its collapse is extremely significant. In 1945 Croce seemed to be the philosopher of the free world; today his work seems to have become a mere subject of historical research, nor is it just experiencing a “purgatory” because all trends of secular thought find themselves compelled to reduce Croce’s thought to an episode in the history of culture (see 269–70). A retrieval of some elements of Croce’s thought will be possible, as we shall see, only in a philosophy of transcendence. But this has happened only in connection with the rediscovery of Marxist thought because his philosophy had resisted the substantial critiques formulated by Catholics and existentialists and, after 1930, had been able to reaffirm itself against Actualism. Subsequently, the attempt to annul Marxism turned around, within immanentist historicism, into total annihilation of the thought of the man who had attempted it. Conversely, Actualism was from the beginning also a theoretical sublation of Marx’s philosophy. The roles have now been inverted, in a perfectly symmetrical way to what happened to Croce’s thought: today the largest kernel of Italian philosophical Marxism is constituted by disciples of disciples of Gentile, who sublate Actualism. This symmetry repeats itself also for atheistic existentialism, which presented itself as the ethical-political sublation of Marxism into a philosophy of freedom. Punctually, as I already remarked, this philosophy has turned into a theoretical justification of the fellow travellers. Their most pertinent critic, Raymond Aron, has stated that, for him, the criterion of truth in judging political facts is to think exactly the opposite of Sartre. It is not a boutade, it is a decisive observation in order to define the meaning of Sartrism. Merleau-Ponty arrived at a-Communism, that is to say at the affirmation of not being a fellow traveller and of being one at the same time; or, equivalently, to the liquidation of the

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“engagedness” of a philosophy that had been born precisely as engaged philosophy. Camus has refused to take this position for moral reasons, let us even say out of awareness of traditional moral values, understood in the highest sense; however, a chasm has opened up between his moralism and his atheism, such that we have to say that, as far as consistency is concerned, Sartre’s atheistic existentialism is superior to his. This is just a confirmation of the judgment I pronounced earlier about Feuerbach, from which it follows that it is impossible to think of a vitalization of Marxism through atheistic existentialism, the reason being … that Marxism has no need of it. The discussions about Marxism and atheistic existentialism have certainly continued and continue still, but we may ask what they achieved, besides giving ambitious young or notso-young authors an occasion to write with little effort essays that look modern and critical. Atheistic existentialism constantly needs to pretend to be a form of scholarly Marxism in order to make it feel the need for its help. By this I do not mean that the problem of the discussion between existential thought and Marxism is not strictly necessary and crucially important for contemporary philosophy; rather, I mean that it must take the form of a discussion of the antithesis between Pascal and Marx (and not between Kierkegaard and Marx, which leads to an utterly fruitless discussion about the opposition between their attitudes). The forms of secular thought that philosophical Marxism did not meet directly during its formation process seem to have more power to resist: positivism, pragmatism, neo-criticism in historicist form. But if you look carefully, their outcome is perfectly symmetrical to that of the forms I considered above. Their claim to surpass Marxism through the Enlightenment is met, as a result, by sociologism separated from the Enlightenment (because it is impossible to reaffirm the Enlightenment after Marxism, even as a form that includes its positivity). It coincides, as we shall see, with one of the two developments of Marxism due to its insuperable contradiction. But it is above all in its ability to explain contemporary political history that the superiority of the interpretation I have proposed becomes manifest, I believe: in the consideration of the new political forms that organized after 1917 and that can find an explanation only in relation to Communism and not as developments of pre-existing forms. Two of them have irrevocably disappeared from history – Nazism and Fascism; the third is still in the game – the affluent society. Now, then, it is a matter of showing that the defeat of the first two was due precisely to

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a subordination in opposition to Communism and that this subordination in opposition can be detected in the affluent society as well. Regarding Fascism we know how terribly difficult it is to transition from a polemic to a historical judgment. The proof that this transition did not happen – or started to happen only with the publication, last year, of the book by historian-philosopher Ernst Nolte109 – is provided by the exclusively polemical (but ridiculing a disease truly does not explain it!) or at most documentary character of the relevant literature. At most a few short pieces are salvageable. Nobody, I believe, can sincerely think that Fascism has been (according to the sentence of the intellectuals of “yesterday’s world”) a mere “irrationalist parenthesis”; or (according to the thesis passively accepted by today’s mainstream press simply because … one has to say something after all) a “revelation” of germs that can be traced back to centuries of closedness to the general course of civilization – since the age of the Counter-Reformation, in short; or, finally, the reaction by the privileged classes against the advance of the working class (this is evidently a mere truism; the fact that the privileged groups preferred Fascism over Communism does not mean at all … that they produced it). To explain it, we must take into account, instead, this fundamental fact: documents, or private communications, attest that the great majority of the more prominent Italian intellectuals,110 secular as well as Catholic, and many of them highly morally respectable, were sympathetic (I use a generic word, but it does not go far enough) to Mussolini for a time; that the greatest Italian philosopher after Rosmini, Gentile, was faithful to Fascism from the beginning until his death; that the great

109 Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1963) [Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1966)]. It could be described, to use current language, as a distinctly super-structural interpretation of Fascism. One can easily see that what he has written about its “transpolitical” character agrees with my ideas about the primacy of “ideal causality” in contemporary history. 110 At least this applies to the great majority of those who had sympathized with the renewal of Italian culture after 1900 promoted by La Critica and by the Florentine journals. Clearly this is about writing history, not holding trials: it would be extremely interesting to gather a complete collection of sincere judgments about Mussolini (leaving out those lowly adulatory) pronounced by intellectuals of some calibre at one moment or another (followed, of course, by the realization of the mistake), motivated often by opposite reasons. Did not Gramsci delude himself in the years immediately before the First World War? Did not Salvemini, in that same period?

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historian Gioacchino Volpe is still faithful; that it is even the case that after the end of Fascism some people who had never adhered to it felt a greater aversion to anti-Fascism. Within this general problem of the relationship between Fascism and the culture we must carve out a more precise question: Is it for no reason that the period in which Fascism established itself coincided with the full success of those Italian forms of Hegelianism whose representatives – from De Sanctis to Croce, from Spaventa to Gentile – perceived their own thought as the theoretical awareness of the secular liberalism of the Risorgimento and intended to continue the work of unification in the cultural sphere? They thought of promoting Italy’s Risorgimento by circulating Italian and European culture and by going beyond the regional cultures in which Italian intellectual life had taken place until then. Except for sporadic hints, until today this question has been carefully avoided. It is not important to investigate now why that happened. But this is where those altogether insufficient interpretations I mentioned above have their genesis. By an obvious reciprocity, they bar the question about the relationship between the final link in this culture, Actualism, and Fascism. Indeed, if Fascism is presented as just the action of a gang of adventurers at the service of big capitalism, or as an expression of the Bovaryism of the petty bourgeois, how will the question of the relationship between Gentile, as a thinker, and Mussolini be posed? People will point out, very correctly, that Gentile’s thought played no role in Mussolini’s formation;111 that Gentile always meant to be a liberal; that at most we should regard what he did as a, possibly disinterested, effort to “clothe the naked,” and so on. At this point I must make myself clear: I have no intention to present Fascism as a historical concretion of Idealist culture. The idea, which is as false as it is common, of a single paradigm for the relationship between philosophy and politics must be abandoned. In reality there is an indefinite variety of types of relationship, and they do not let themselves be pigeon-holed into the single model of discipleship. Let us consider, for example, the undeniable relationship that links Croce and Giolitti, which has been much discussed but so far has not been defined

111 One should say otherwise about Croce’s thought, even though the influence was indirect.

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with the desired precision; it is obviously an entirely different relationship than that between Marx and Lenin, or also Gentile and Mussolini. Thus, the encounter between Actualism and Fascism must be studied in its very particular singularity. Actually, Fascism rises from an extremely noteworthy intuition: beneath the reality of classes there is a deeper reality, which Communism has ignored, the reality of nations. This is proven by the fact that a revolution that was initially thought to be worldwide came to a halt.112 But this intuition was rethought by Mussolini according to the categories of the revolutionary socialism in which he had grown up. As a result, the affirmation of the reality of the nation pushed to the extreme the aspect – which was present but was not the only one – in which nationalism transcribed Marxism, replacing the class struggle with the struggle for power among the nations. The results of this mixing of nationalism and socialism are: a. Fascism’s nature as nationalism that reaches the masses. This is a ­truly unique occurrence because nationalism is an aristocratic ­phenomenon (please note that its origin is fairly recent: the nationalist doctrine did not exist before Maurras or, if you want to add this name, Barrès). Therefore, in Fascism, we must assign priority to the aspect that originates from revolutionary socialism. In other words, there is not some sort of ideal continuity between nationalism and Fascism. It is not the ideology of the Action Française that prepares Fascism but,113 rather, Fascism that absorbs nationalism. The ­historical question about Fascism is how this link could be ­established without indulging in easy rhetoric about “betrayals.”

112 Was there in this intuition a correct aspect? I think so: the reality of the nation, as man’s relationship to his tradition and history, cannot be deduced from the economic, as relationship between man and nature. This is so much so that, in order to explain the success of the Communist Revolution in Russia – against the Marxist predictions that the revolution would start in France, would continue in Germany, and would end in England – we must turn to Russian history, to the form of its religious tradition, to the formation and history of its intelligentsia, and so on. 113 I am talking about the Action Française having in mind the sequence of the three reactionary forms of the twentieth century. The relationship between Action Française and Fascism is repeated mutatis mutandis in that between Fascism and Nazism.

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b. Fascism’s two souls, the traditionalist (which leads to the Lateran Treaty) and the socialist and subversive. Hence its instability: we might say, referring to the title of Zangrandi’s well-known book, that Fascist awareness is a “travelling awareness.” Its journey can conclude either with traditionalism or with Communism but usually with the latter (because of the priority I mentioned).

Hence two questions: (1) How did this encounter of revolutionary socialism and nationalism take place and where did it come from? (2) How did the encounter between Mussolini and Gentile take place – that is, the encounter between the representatives of two traditions that until then had had no relationship at all, Romagna’s revolutionary socialism and Neapolitan Hegelianism? Regarding the first question, I think we have to answer that Mussolini’s life is the best document for a study of the idea of total revolution untethered from Marxist materialism and linked, instead, to the vitalistic trends in early twentieth-century thought. That is, Fascism is the full realization and the complete defeat of the type of revolutionary socialism that accepted the Idealist critique (in a broad sense) of naturalistic materialism and of scientism, without assuming Marx’s true position (or regarding it as a contradictory combination of revolutionary spirit and materialism). We must recall, therefore, what I said earlier about the Marxist inseparability of total revolution and integral materialism, which was fully understood for the first time by Lenin. Only their unity enables the revolution to have its own content (indeed, as I say later, the thesis of the duality and dialectic antithesis of the social classes, far from being an empirical observation, presupposes such materialism and therefore could not but be abandoned by Fascism). Conversely, when the revolutionary idea, in the sense of total revolution, is separated from dialectical materialism, it irrationalizes. And its irrationalization takes the form of activism, characterized by tension towards action not finalized to any order, by the demotion of values and by the de-recognition of other people as I’s.114 However, we must explain

114 From this point of view, one can certainly find some analogies between Fascism and decadentism. This is why it is important to study the relations between Fascism and the political tension of irrationalist-decadent artistic movements (Futurism; the March of Rome conceived by D’Annunzio and realized by Mussolini). We must just remark that, in order to realize itself in political form, Fascism could not but ally with traditionalist and reactionary forces because it had no intrinsic content

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precisely what this de-recognition of other people means. The activist will cannot be identified with the selfish will or with the bourgeois spirit. Selfishness is a moral flaw, the practical de-recognition that other people are real, after having previously recognized them as real. It is essentially static – the selfish man is “the one who does not move”; it is by nature apolitical since its political demands reduce to “demanding order.” And even though the agonistic character establishes a kinship between activism and the bourgeois spirit (according to the well-known Marxist view, the bourgeois man is agonistic because, being cut off from the community, he can only find himself again through competition), nonetheless the bourgeois spirit operates within a given order (it is conservative), whereas activism is actually directed against all orders, even if it must feign to be creating a “new order.” In activism’s case, it is a comprehensive perspective whereby other people are reduced to objects so that, in reference to them, it no longer makes sense to speak of moral duties – that is, activism coincides with the form of lived solipsism. Such a disposition must necessarily mystify itself as moralism. If the world reduces to things, and I alone recognize myself as subject, the world is for me, I must dominate it. This will to power becomes a moral imperative since I cannot give it up without betraying myself and becoming an object that deserves to be dominated, without falling back into “banal existence.” Mussolini’s constant presentation of his will to power as heroic will should not be regarded as insincerity and trickery but as a necessity that follows from the essence of activism. This practice – which must present itself as ethical and religious, while at the same time it cannot, just as necessarily, not de-recognize moral and religious life because of the failure to recognize the other as an I – can only explicate itself at the level of politics, which is thought to absorb all values. This is the ultimate contradiction of activism: between politicity and solipsism, which are both intrinsic to it, so that political action can explicate itself only as the disintegration of an already given reality (and, as a matter of fact, the Fascist period coincided with the final crisis of a historical reality, which had started in 1861 – namely, the Kingdom of Italy). and because it was obliged to oppose both liberalism (by reason of its own socialistrevolutionary origins) and Communism. This explains the aversion to it on the part of the artistic movements of an irrationalist type that emerged after 1930. With regard to Communism, it is important to note that, around 1930, Fascism was often perceived at the “Western” alternative to it.

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Because of its lack of intrinsic finality due to its solipsistic character, Fascism can only take from outside a content that, by itself, is foreign to the original revolutionary disposition (i.e., tradition, the nation), thus appropriating the nationalist replacement of class struggle by the struggle of nations. Hence the problem of reconciliation, first with the tradition of the Risorgimento and then with the Catholic Church. These reconciliations were insincere because they were not reconciliations with values but with historical forces to be used as instruments. Hence, also, Fascism’s break – which had the character of a struggle to the death – with the other form born from revolutionary interventionism, which after various vicissitudes took the name Partito d’Azione, and viewed the agreement with the traditional forces of Italian conservatism – the monarchy and the Church – as a betrayal of the Risorgimento. The fact that the criticisms of activism and solipsism that have been made against Fascism and Actualism alike are identical and insuperable must make us reflect. Was it, on Gentile’s part, an illusion or a mere sophistic performance by a philosopher who was not morally equal to his ideas? Or was Actualism, on the contrary, truly obliged to consent, even though it could not act as a guide and influence Fascism as a practical force, and had to limit its political function to letting Fascism insert itself into tradition by means of its perspective on the history of the Risorgimento? In order to answer, we must consider the curious contradiction whereby on the one hand Actualism was restless with desire for action, while on the other hand it was utterly impotent to outline and propose, let alone to form, a political movement. And we must also consider the negations it was forced to pronounce about existing political forms. As far as the tension towards politics is concerned, we must observe that, for Gentile, the exploration in his youth of Marx’s philosophy – which at that time he rethought in the least Marxist disposition one can imagine, that is, completely abstracting philosophy from politics – was the beginning of a process that led him to the politicity of philosophy, remaking, somehow, Marxism within Idealism. If we want to look in the past for the roots of Fascism, we have to say – with a degree of paradox (because it is not a relationship of doctrinal derivation but a necessary encounter) that, however, has a deep aspect of truth – that its theoretical starting point must be identified in Gentile’s commentary on the Theses on Feuerbach (1899), which was the first study, in the world, of the philosophy of the young Marx. It marks the beginning of the position of sublation [inveramento] of Marxism,

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which is quite distinct from revisionism. Revisionism aims at isolating what is thought to be the healthy part of Marxism (its economic theory, its sociology), and to think it in a different philosophical framework or independently of any such framework. In the sublation thesis, instead, the intention is to extract the positive aspect of Marx’s philosophy, which makes it irreducible to any other form of modern thought, and to free it only of its metaphisicalist115 and materialistic elements. In Gentile we have the beginning, at the theoretical level, of the position of sublation, which then was proper both to Fascism and to subsequent anti-Fascist progressivism. So, the encounter was necessary, despite their different backgrounds, because the irrationalization of Hegelianism by Gentile corresponds to the irrationalization of revolutionary socialism by Mussolini. The fact that the encounter was tangential, that the constitutive processes of Fascism and Actualism are completely different, tells us, for sure, that the meaning of Gentile’s philosophy cannot be measured by it; but the necessity of the encounter tells us that we cannot truly situate his philosophy without taking it into account. Therefore, the comparison between Actualism and Marxism is extremely important and, so far, has not been conducted exhaustively. I will just propose the following point of view, merely stating some of the terms of the question: the process of thought that started in Hegel came to manifest its insuperable contradiction in the two opposite and irreconcilable positions of Marx (and Lenin) and Gentile. Indeed, in the transition from Hegelianism to the philosophy of praxis, Gentile takes praxis to the highest degree of purity through Idealism; and his critique, not so much of realism but of the necessary conversion of realism into materialism in any philosophy of absolute immanence is irrefutable, from the standpoint of truth. But, on the other hand, after being purified such praxis remains undetermined; by reason of this indeterminacy, one goes from the revolutionary idea to activism or to the activist form of solipsism. Gentile’s philosophy is a philosophy of praxis that contradicts itself as such because it does not give rise to any practice and must encounter a political position whose constitutive process is entirely different.

115 [TN] Here and later I use “metaphysicalist” to translate Del Noce’s “metafisicistico,” which he uses as a critical/derogatory counterpart of “metafisico” (metaphysical).

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We know that Lenin wrote that Gentile’s book was one of the very few commentaries by non-Marxist philosophers worth reading. What precisely did he mean, and can we speak of a real influence on Lenin by Gentile? I don’t think that this investigation could yield any results if conducted at the philological level. However, one can still formulate a conjecture that has a strong whiff of truth about it: Gentile called Lenin’s attention to the thought of the young Marx and its Hegelian origins. By studying them, Lenin arrived at a thesis that was the complete opposite of Gentile’s – namely, the unity of materialism and philosophy of action, and of Idealism and solipsism. If we go back to Lukàcs’s thesis that Lenin the politician is explained by Lenin the ­philosopher, we are easily induced to view the duel between Fascism and Communism as the political aspect of the duel between Gentile and Lenin, which, within the horizon of radical immanentism, has a catastrophic outcome for the former. However, this view is superficial. Lenin is certainly correct when he goes back to Marx’s thesis about the unity of revolutionary idea and integral materialism, conceived as materialism after Idealism; indeed, the idea of social man, whose implementation is the content of the revolution, is sustainable only from the point of view of integral materialism. And he is correct in thinking that only by this route can Marxism be reaffirmed. But can the theoretical value of an idea be deduced from its practical power? Or does the Leninist reaffirmation of Marx take place within the replacement of the idea of truth by the idea of myth? Does his critique of Idealism concern Idealism in itself or its convenience for the revolutionary idea, which he has already elevated to absolute practical value, in relation to which theories must be judged? Does his question concern the theoretical value of Marxism or, rather, what can be done with the Marxist theory? The answers do not seem to be in doubt. But then it seems inevitable to conclude that his attitude differs profoundly from that of Marx, for whom practical efficacy was just the sign of the truth of a theory. Moreover, one understands the relevance of Nietzsche – as the theoretician of myth in the modern sense, as creation of a vital instrument and expression of the will to power – as an interpreter of contemporary reality (of the very reality that Marxism has brought about). One also understands the particular power of the Marxist myth due to its capturing of real rational elements (such as the transition, within radical immanentism, from the type of the philosopher to the type of the revolutionary). But at the same time, it becomes

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legitimate to ask whether it is precisely this replacement of philosophy by myth that is the root of the process of deterioration that affects, in my judgment, Communism in its historical reality. *** We can then say that Fascism, in its subordination-opposition to Communism, corresponds to the Leninist stage of the revolution. Nazism, instead, is the phenomenon correlative to Stalinism in this subordination-opposition. With the thesis of socialism in one country, Stalin had nationalized Communism; thus, with him Marxism seemed to have become the instrument for an inversion of the movement of history, for the westward counter-expansion of the East against the West, and the first nation threatened by it was Germany. Nazism arose, depending on this impression, as an attempt to free the German tradition from all that had led to Marxism, where German tradition meant what had led to justifying the political primacy of Germany. Because Marxism is the rethinking in a Hebrew spirit of the philosophy that Hegel had thought with a Greek mindset, anti-Communism goes hand in hand with anti-Semitism, and the total rejection of biblical thought leads to a break with Christianity. Hence racist neo-paganism, the explicit return to mythical awareness, the opposition between the master race and the servant race, and so on. Hence the absolutely total subordination to Marxism, and then also totalitarianism (in reference to Fascism we should speak – I postpone the analysis to some other occasion – of a truncated totalitarian form). If one wants to draw a line of succession, which however must not be thought as necessary continuity, among the reactionary forms of the twentieth century, one has to say that the Action Française lacks the totalitarian character, that in Fascism we have a truncated totalitarianism, in Nazism totalitarianism. Notice that these different characters preclude the possibility of thinking of them as species of the same genus (of that “proximate” genus that allegedly should be “reaction against historical progress”). So, Nazism as a fact carries a very important teaching about the place of Marxism in the history of philosophy. Within secular German thought, the pure negation of Marxism implies also the negation of its whole tradition, with the singular exception of Nietzsche. The meaning of this exception will be discussed shortly.

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Regarding the form of subordination of the affluent society, I refer the reader to essay IV (above all pages 256ff). *** But now, let us look at the other side of the coin. Even if they are subordinate, the forms of opposition I mentioned have determined an internal evolution of Communism. Its character is that of a process whereby Communism transforms from faith in a revolution that will realize a world of equals into an instrument of power for a nation and a class, that techno-bureaucratic class about which so much has been written. That is to say, there is an ideal action that Communism exerts on the world that opposes it, which translates into subordinating to it the forms in which this world expresses itself. But, on the other hand, these forms have a counter-effect on the reality of Communism, which brings about a deterioration characterized by the loss of the religiousrevolutionary spirit. This deterioration can only take the form of the transition from revolutionary politics to politics of pure power, and it comes in different guises depending on the adversary. Consider, in fact, the internal evolution and its characteristics: the universal revolution conceived by Lenin and Trotsky halts in front of the reality of the nations. Stalin’s figure rises, as the realistic acceptance of this halt, and we must say that it is not at all true that he was the demonic caricature that he is often clumsily ridiculed as today, as if he understood Communism in a Nazi way. Setting aside all moral judgments, he was instead, in a strictly political sense, one of history’s greatest political geniuses. Stalinism was the form that Communism necessarily had to take in order to preserve itself in an ideologically hostile world. It meant provisionally building socialism in one country, while waiting for the contradictions that would plunge non-Communist nations into war, a prediction that came to pass. And it meant exploiting with extraordinary ability these contradictions, so that the public opinion in democratic countries was given the impression that Communism was Russian history, and that the revolution could not be exported. The result was a Eurocentric vision in which the antagonists were, on the one side, the liberal idea (in the higher sense) or spiritual values, and on the other side earthly, vitalist, and irrational forces supported by selfish economic interests. I am not saying that this vision did not include some truth,

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and that Nazism and Fascism were not the primary, necessary enemies between 1930 and 1945; but it failed to grasp the primary ideal causality of the crisis. Furthermore, Stalinism meant the industrialization and militarization of Russia so that, if it became involved in the war, its contribution would be decisive, and this also came to pass. It meant picking up again the transformation of the war into a World Revolution through the hegemony that the Communists established over the Resistance. And, in fact, the Communist Resistance prevailed wherever the AngloAmericans did not intervene. The result was expansion into Eastern Europe and China, and Communism becoming the master of half of the world. But, at the same time, this first step in the evolution leads to a break between the revolutionary and the politician, between Stalin and Trotsky. Dropping the revolutionary spirit produces a phenomenon that is the opposite of the expected withering away of the State, and this gives rise to the new class, to its domination, and to its privileges. Trotsky said that the revolution had been betrayed, and in his polemic against Stalin we can find all possible criticisms from the political and social standpoint of Communism as it has become realized. He just forgot to ask himself, or in any case answered the question inadequately, whether such betrayal was necessary, and necessary in Stalin’s precise form, in order for Communism as a political reality to endure. The results were a necessary break between the revolutionary and the power politician, the figure of the latter becoming realized to the highest degree ever, and an equally necessary victory of power politics over the revolutionary spirit. That is to say, the union of utopianism and Machiavellianism fell apart. Correlatively, a break with the intellectuals took place. The author of the last great work of theoretical Marxism, History and Class Consciousness, Lukàcs, had to disown it with a humiliating statement in 1924 (and the first Lukàcs was followed by a second Lukàcs, who is much less interesting, or interesting only to the extent that he covertly picks up again the motifs of his first self). The Leninist thesis that identified philosophy and the party (which meant that philosophers led the revolution) was inverted into the total subordination of philosophy to politics. Marxism was counterfeited into a clumsy scholasticism, which instead of guiding politics is subordinate to it; and which deepens and evolves only by carrying out the task of justifying Stalin’s every political act; and which takes a typical scientistic character in order to fulfill its task of providing the proofs to convict.

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The most complete confirmation that this process is irreversible is given by Khrushchev’s politics, which can be characterized as the adaptation of Communism to a new and still unexpected adversary – the affluent society. This requires liquidating the myth of Stalin – a liquidation that is internal and necessary to Khrushchevism but that is stupidly taken by certain democratic people in every country to be a proof of a necessary democratic evolution. It would be interesting to compare Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin with that of Trotsky, to show that it is not an impossible return to the revolutionary phase but, rather, a continuation of the realistic line in relation to a new adversary, which demands that Communism reconfigure itself. People have correctly described this development as a second Social Democratic crisis, in the sense that Social Democracy is defined by the idea that in socialism the end is nothing, the movement is everything. But obviously what is happening is not that Communism is evolving towards the old kind of Social Democracy but, rather, that Russia is taking a place in the world similar to the place that Social Democracy had taken in the various national communities – with the changes that follow, due to the repercussions of foreign policy, in Russia’s internal policy and in the attitude of the Communist parties in the various countries. By being the definitive liquidation of every fervour of revolutionary mysticism, Khrushchevism has united against itself a coalition of all old-style Communists: Stalinists, Trotskyists, and the Chinese. That explains the obligations that weigh on its politics. It can assert its orthodoxy against its adversaries only by quoting Lenin’s text “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder – that is, by professing its realism against the utopianism of the adversaries. And it can establish the superiority of its realism only by showing that the expansion of Communism continues in a world in which the contradictions of capitalist states no longer produce wars. And it is easy to understand in what direction and by what methods this expansion can take place, after the affluent society has removed the possibility of revolutionary action – by abolishing or at least diminishing poverty – and after, on the other hand, the route towards Asia has been blocked. The Chinese schism had the effect of permanently pushing Russia back into Europe – whereas with Stalinism Russia had taken a somewhat Asian countenance – thereby solving a centuries-old historical problem – of making it, somehow, a bulwark against the East, which had been Germany’s traditional role. Just as Germany has aspired to European hegemony, so necessarily now will

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Russia. But the realization of this hegemony can only happen by democratic methods. It will still be a conquest in the sense of subordination of nations, but it cannot happen either as war or as revolution. However, this evolution does not imply any real opening to Christianity or to the values of freedom; it merely marks the final stage in the transition of Marxism from faith to instrument of power. But it will still not be possible for Communism to disown Marxism and therefore atheism, which is its starting point, nor totalitarianism, nor the idea of universal revolution (changed into that of universal domination), which are its consequences. In the same way the Borgias could aspire to transform the papacy into a temporal principality but could not deny the existence of God and Incarnation and Redemption because, by doing so, they would have denied the same religion they wanted to use as a tool. Indeed, in regard to totalitarianism, we must observe that it is first of all a moral and philosophical reality based on the ethics of the direction of history and that, in its study, we must take into account this priority over juridical and organizational aspects (otherwise we run the risk of confusing the concept with entirely different ones, like absolutism, dictatorship, personal state, Eastern despotism, possibly theocratic regime, etc.); that we must not associate totalitarianism, as people usually do, with the idea of extermination camps and so on, even though one is easily led to this association by remembering Hitler and Stalin; that in principle it can realize itself while formally preserving democratic institutions; that the true point on which it cannot not be intransigent is the ethics I mentioned. This intransigence implies: (a) suppressing individual freedom to dissent, at least to the extent that it affects practice (evidently such suppression can also be achieved in a non-explicitly violent form, via a practically unconditional domination of the press and of education, perhaps keeping open the possibility of “dialogue” with a form of opposition set up in advance for defeat); (b) the persecution, which may well be bloodless, of authentic religious thought. This persecution may go together with broad tolerance of popular forms of worship, or with explicit support for groups of Catholic modernists or progressives who take up the task of defending the new ethics of the “direction of history.” Based on these observations, we can explain the Communist thesis about the plurality of ways. ***

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The inseparability of philosophy and political action in Marxism has led me to this discussion, which only apparently moves away from philosophy. Clearly, this very quick treatment has no intention of replacing a rigorous study. All I need to say is the following: the most widely accepted assessments identify in the history of Communism a breaking process between the revolutionary (as unity of the philosopher and the politician) and the pure politician (for whom every idea reduces to an instrument for power), and this cannot but represent, from the standpoint of rigorous Marxism, a process of deterioration. Is this process necessary? This question could not be answered even by the most rigorous collection of historical data. It must take a different form: whether there is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction, of which the historical process is the manifestation. It is easy enough to characterize this contradiction, if we apply to it the methods of investigation that Max Weber used for Calvinism. Let us not ask ourselves now whether Weber’s thought is intentionally directed at inverting the Marxist perspective since I do not possess the necessary expertise to answer this question.116 Let us just recall his thesis that Calvinist theology and ethics are the basis upon which capitalism built itself (for a Marxist, evidently, Calvinism would be only one among the possible ideologies of the budding capitalist class). Analogously, we ought to say that Communism is the coming to reality of classic German philosophy in the aspect that is new and specific, in the sense of being irreconcilable with tradition. Let us consider the list of reasons that persuade us that this argument is possible. First of all, the ambiguity of the way in which Marxist doctrine presents itself historically. Whereas, from one perspective, it cannot but present itself as the self-awareness reached by the proletarian class about itself and its historical mission, from another perspective it poses as the endpoint of classical German philosophy and, thereby, as the end result of the entire process of thought. Recall Engels’s sentence that the proletariat is the heir of classical German philosophy. It means that, since classical German philosophy is the result of all previous philosophies, 116 The idea that Weber’s thought is the essential antithesis of Marxism is advocated by Gurvitch, Le concept de classes sociales de Marx à nos jours (Paris: CDU, 1954). The opposite idea is advocated by Pietro Rossi, Lo storicismo tedesco (Turin: Einaudi, 1956). I confess that I incline towards the former.

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the proletariat is the heir of everything positive and progressive that has been realized in the history of the world. The proletarian revolution is the result of philosophy that has reached its fulfilment. Are these two perspectives unifiable? This is a problem that Marxist theoreticians have always avoided, reasoning as if they were effectively unified; as if the coincidence between the conclusion of modern philosophy and the self-awareness reached by the proletariat was obvious, and one should not even ask the question whether this proletariat, defined by a philosophical route, may be an ideal proletariat different from the real proletariat, and whether the break between the ideal and the real – which was the objection raised against Hegel, as a fundamental contradiction – does not reoccur within Marxism. Now, it is extremely curious that this unification seems to lie within the realm of possibility for every philosophy except the Marxist. Indeed, the thesis of historical materialism sets up a distinction between conscious thought and real forces. Supposedly, ideologies can only be understood starting from their “secret history,” from the economic conditions that explain all political and spiritual histories. Now, attempts at explaining, for example, the philosophy of Descartes by the fact that Descartes was a member of the Third Estate, or English empiricism by the development of the bourgeoisie, are certainly possible, whatever their value may be. On the contrary, not even the attempt is possible for Marxism: its thought cannot be explained by “Marx the proletarian” rather than, from the standpoint of logic, by Marx the Hegelian philosopher who intends to push the doctrine of his teacher to the farthest consequences and therefore is forced to turn it upside down. If we take the perspective of secret history, we are forced to think of a renewal of Hebrew prophetism, entirely secularized after Hegelianism.117 This is why people have correctly pointed out that Marxism did not generalize itself and that it used the critique of ideologies as an accusatory weapon. It is easy to spot the mark of this contradiction in a famous passage from the Manifesto: “Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, 117 See Löwith, Meaning in History, 45–6. However, I have already said how much I disagree with this thesis. I believe that the perspective of the secret history is in fact inapplicable.

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and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” This shows that Marx was unable to achieve an explanation of the historical process through the dichotomy of classes, and he was unable to do so precisely in relation to the contradiction I pointed out above: it is impossible to explain his own doctrine through historical materialism. It matters little that this group is not numerous. What matters is that, by Marx’s own admission, there exist particular individuals who are not assigned to be part of a particular class by an objective condition but who have, by reason of their culture, the faculty to choose; and who, as a consequence, cannot but present themselves as guides with respect to the class they have chosen. The adhesion to the proletarian class by the group of the intellectuals cannot be assimilated to that by the impoverished petty bourgeoisie. Granted, according to Marx, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population, but the collaboration of the intellectuals seems to be indispensable for the very formation of the class if, as we have seen, the engine of the revolutions is the selfawareness that the proletariat acquires about itself. Discussing the distinction in the second chapter between proletarians and Communists, an old commentator of the Manifesto, Andler, developed an ingenious interpretation of a Leibnizian kind: as if the proletarians represented obscure and confused knowledge, and the Communists clear and distinct knowledge. Then, it is precisely the task of the intellectuals to bring to actuality what is virtual in that obscure and confused knowledge, thus creating the proletarian class. In the final analysis, according to Marx, the particular group of the intellectuals and the ideologists – who know, by a purely philosophical investigation, the direction of history as a whole – superimposes itself on the two classes of the capitalists and the proletarians. In this respect, we can say that in Marx there is still the distinction, which is classical in rationalism (and, in it, inevitable) between the philosopher and the common people. The difference is that the philosophers of the previous age sought an alliance with the princes against the invincibly superstitious and ignorant commoners; conversely, Marx seeks an alliance with  the proletariat against the ruling classes. So, how could this

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contradiction seem irrelevant to Marx? Here again we must refer to the typical convictions of Hegelian philosophers: they thought they had reached the fullness of time and that their thought represented the ripe final fruit of the centuries-long process of philosophy. Because of this certainty of possessing the absolute truth, it was easy for Marx to think of a direct communication between his thought and that of the proletariat, in the sense that his thought would have the function of giving an account of the revolution that the proletariat – which thinks according to true categories by virtue of its situation – must carry out by the internal necessity of history. Basically, in vetero-Marxism the contradiction could be, if not actually overcome, at least concealed by making recourse to the theological and deterministic formulation of the philosophy of history, which makes it vulnerable to the critique coming from historicism. In relation to this, just as it has been said that Hegel thought of himself as the secretary of the Absolute, we could analogously say that Marx thought of himself as the secretary of the Proletariat in its role as cosmic Mediator and Redeemer. In relation to this, “Communists” (the intellectuals) have, according to the Manifesto, the function of accompanying as “clear awareness” a necessary movement of history. In other words, in old Marxism, precisely because it was thought in the old sense of the philosophy of history, the social prevails over the political. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902) marks, by way of contrast, the birth of the Communist party (or of the new idea of the party) and of totalitarianism. The usual interpretation of Marxism gets completely inverted, in the sense that its sociology is entirely subordinated to its philosophy (and, consequently, the “social” to the “political”), and that this philosophy is made completely independent of any origin in social class. What the proletariat is, is determined by the awareness of philosophers, which is no longer the “reflection” of the social situation. As for the proletariat, it must conform to the idea that philosophers have created of it. Left to its own devices, the proletariat is in a state of moral apathy. We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labour

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legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. According to their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. Similarly, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the labour movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary Socialist intelligentsia … There is a lot of talk about spontaneity, but the spontaneous development of the labour movement leads to its becoming subordinated to the bourgeois ideology, leads to its developing according to the program of the Credo, for the spontaneous labour movement is pure and simple trade unionism, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers to the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the labour movement from its spontaneous, trade unionist striving to go under the wing of the bourgeoisie … Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers … To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democrats must go among all classes of the population; must dispatch units of their army in all directions.118

These texts are well known but seldom well understood. Should we view them as the confession on Lenin’s part of reducing Marxism to an ideological tool? I think this is true, in the sense of transitioning from the man of truth to the man of ideological myths, in the political and modern sense I described. But the fact remains that Lenin rediscovered – albeit in the different disposition that the revolutionary antecedes the philosopher – the revolutionary spirit of original Marxism and that this rediscovery could not happen in any other way. People have often described it as Blanquism, as Sorelism (i.e., as adopting the Fascist principle of élites, incompatible with Marxism), as Bakuninism, as the inclusion of Marxism in a Russian revolutionary tradition foreign to it. We know that these are the typical Social Democratic criticisms. What is true in them is that Lenin developed to the ultimate consequences the critique of revisionism that Sorel had 118 Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1946), 170, 177, 204.

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started, without stopping, however, at a position that was still idealistic but, rather, rediscovering the philosophy of young Marx and its relationship with Hegel. So that in the years 1914–15 he prepared for action by taking notes in his Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic. And what is also true is that his Marxism is Marxism after Bakunin, unlike the Social Democratic Marxism against Bakunin. In other words, his Marxism is linked with the criticism of religion in Germany as it had developed around 1840, not separated from it. The essential thing is that he rediscovered the genuine formative process of Marx’s thought and, in it, the precedence of the idea of the revolutionary philosopher over the idea of class, with the consequence that the proletarian class does not formally preexist the action of the revolutionary philosopher. [What is needed is] the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it … a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-­ winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat … The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without transcending the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.119

What must be noticed here is that this definition, which already contains all the essential characters of his concept of the proletariat, was formulated by Marx completely a priori, that is, before any verification of the empirical reality of its object. Therefore, it is not a sociological observation of facts – in the sense that sociology strives to set aside all value

119 See A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843). Regarding the precedence and the determining function of the philosophical moment in the formation of the Marxist theory of social classes, see my essay “Classi sociali e dottrina marxista,” in Atti della XXXI Settimana Sociale dei cattolici d’Italia (Rome: Edizioni Settimane Sociali, 1959). The treatment of the same topic in Fr Fessard’s subsequent work De l’actualité historique (2:303–24 and passim) perfectly confirms my thesis [TN: in the available English translations of this text by Marx “transcendence” is used for aufhebung, which I normally translate as “sublation”].

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judgments, at least to the extent that they are conscious – but a direct derivation from his purely philosophical critique of Hegel. That is to say, in Marx there is an aspect that clearly derives from Hegel (in the sense, as I have said, of reaffirming Hegel against his critics), which leads to the primacy of praxis, to man as the creator of his own history, to the new task of the philosopher, no longer to interpret the world but to change it. And there is the objectivization of this position within the deterministic vision of the philosophy of history typical of the nineteenth century. Hence the materialistic affirmation of the primacy of economic life, the thesis that Communism is the result of the inevitable history of production, the thesis of the determining power of the infrastructure (i.e., the forms of production that correspond to social relationships), of which the superstructure, ideologies, are the reflection. Now, it was inevitable that, during the further development of socialist thought, the two positions would break apart and that both of them would give up on the original hope in the outcome of the Revolution. Thus, Lenin pushes to the ultimate consequences the idea that the Communist Party (which for him is a philosophical reality) is the point of arrival of classical German philosophy. Moreover, if we consider the rigorous development of the themes of his thought, we can observe that they verify completely the thesis I stated earlier: the philosophy of history can preserve its revolutionary meaning, but only on the condition of affirming the primacy of action and breaking away from the deterministic conception. This line of development did, indeed, bring about a revolution, which, however, came to fruition in a diametrically opposite form to that predicted by its prophet; and which not only came but had to come to fruition in this form, by an internal necessity. It started, as has been repeated a million times, not where bourgeois capitalism had reached its highest degree but in Russia, where it was just at the beginning; and the Industrial Revolution followed, did not cause, the political revolution. Instead of unifying the world, it forced a recourse to what seem old categories of the philosophy of history – East and West. Did it succeed in the East simply because it found strength in underdeveloped countries, or is there a deeper reason? To cite the most authoritative historian of the idea of Europe, de Rougemont,120 the

120 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 69–71.

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Eastern spirit is marked by the conception that finite individuality is evil and by the consequent aspiration to total fusion with the divine. Conversely, Western spirituality has been shaped by Christianity, which, by insisting on the infinite qualitative difference between creator and creature, makes it possible to speak of communion but not of substantial union; which, moreover, with the concept of creation denies that the root of evil lies in creatural finitude. Certainly, it seems that an abyss separates the gnostic and neo-Platonic dissolution into the One from the Marxist struggle for a classless society; and it is indeed the abyss between a conception of spirituality as return and the greatest openness to the future. We must ask ourselves, however, whether this may not be an opposition inside a common essence since the overall formula we can use to grasp the philosophical as well as political essence of Marxism is its effort to realize the dialectics that affirms the historical and mortal character of every reality and every truth. Marxism, that is, has allowed the Eastern spirit to take its revenge on the West because it has enabled it to appropriate the direction towards the future (and with it activity, technical work) but, at the same time, without giving up the conception of the negativity of the finite. Marxism has been the mediating element between two positions that traditionally seemed to be opposed – the conception of the negativity of the finite and the technical spirit. Based on the rare passages in which Marx sketches a description of realized Communism, we can see that he is thinking of a transformation of human nature such that it becomes intrinsically social, of a sort of absorption of individual consciousness into social consciousness. Given the new relations of production, consciousness is the theoretical form of that of which the real community is the living image. It would be interesting to study the symmetry between this conception and the ancient conception of absorption into the One. Thus, the final outcome of the revolutionary spirit seems to be, because of the philosophy immanent in it, the inversion of the movement of history, no longer from the West towards the East but from the East towards the West. Even though in its Eastern success Marxism cannot but sacrifice other aspects of the Eastern spirit – that is, the contemplative values (and it is precisely by aiming at the salvation of these values that the West today can take a non-colonialist political approach to the East). This complete contradiction of the promise (in Marx re-emerges the prophetic spirit, in the sense I have mentioned, and “a prophet is a man

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who promises”) by the historical result is the object the five fundamental criticisms to which all others that are generally made against Communism as a political reality can be traced back. All of them originated from Trotsky, even though Trotsky was not able to draw the ultimate consequences and ran in a circle of contradictions from the beginning (1927) to the end of his polemic. According to the first criticism, already at the beginning of Communism in our century there was an inversion of the relationship established by Marx between class and party. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat that Marx thought was necessary for the revolutionary leap has been perverted. It was supposed to be the first historical example of a dictatorship of the majority over the minority because history, until today, has allegedly been a sequence of dictatorships of minorities over majorities. It became realized, instead, as a dictatorship of the party (i.e., of the minority made up of professional revolutionaries) over the proletariat. However, is this not the necessary consequence of Lenin’s rediscovery of and faithfulness to original Marxism, meaning not to the letter of the doctrine after 1848 but to its genetic process? Then, in the period after the revolutionary struggle, a new technobureaucratic class formed, based on the party, which is fundamentally different from the bureaucratic layer in a non-Communist state because, in a non-Communist state, bureaucrats depend on political power, whereas in Communism they have nobody above them. Thus they constitute a class that concentrates all power within itself, finding no external constraints precisely because property has been collectivized. This class is more oppressive than any other that established itself in history because no moral limits restrain it from any form of abuse against its subjects since the mirage of the future “classless society” serves as a practical justification to use any means, even those that consist in denying the value of the individual personality. However, must not the phenomenon necessarily take place as soon as the revolutionary impetus is succeeded by regime consolidation? To explain it, we only have to think of the typology of the lions and the foxes, as Pareto drew it. When within a ruling class it happens that only foxes are called to join it, while lions are rejected (Stalin’s victory over Trotsky) – which is inevitable in a period when the revolutionary impetus comes to a forced and necessary halt – the dominance of the instinct for combinations is inevitable, so that the governing class focuses on the present and cares less about the future: so-called Stalinist and post-Stalinist realism.

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But given this dominance of the present, what is going to be the fate of the philosophy on which this ruling class is founded if, like that of Marx, it is future-oriented? Simply to be entirely reduced to ideology as instrument of power, a reduction that must take the form of the scholastics I already mentioned. Correlatively, what according to Marx was alienation in the beyond is replaced by alienation in the future, in which the critique that Marx had formulated against transcendent religion gets exactly inverted, thus becoming fully rigorous. In close correspondence, the meaning of human emancipation is also inverted. With the complete reduction of philosophy to ideology – that is, with the disappearance of the idea of truth vis-à-vis the spirit of power – ideas (including that of human emancipation) are reduced to instruments to be used as purely material devices. The affective motive powers are regarded and handled like things, in a technicist mindset, by Marxist leaders, who can speculate on them like the “barons” of the capitalist market speculate on commodities. Thus, we reach “a complete disregard of the difference between material reality and human reality.” In the consequent reduction of man himself to capital we have the maximum extension of the capitalist spirit. The replacement of struggles between nations with class struggles has not been realized. On the contrary, the class-based party has brought about the resurgence of Islamic-type imperialism, whereby “Islam” I mean the union, aimed at conquest, of a religion and a people, such that the leaders of that people strive to dominate, through that religion, beyond its borders.121 On the other side, however, there is Marx according to whom ideologies can be explained based on economic reality and social relations. There is Marx the creator of the “sociology of knowledge,” and this idea of his cannot but apply to Marxism as well. There is, therefore, the objectivization of Marxism into sociology. Next to revolutionary Marxism there is, thus, its continuation into absolute relativism – that is, into the most complete negation of the revolutionary spirit. By such negation,

121 I present the last two criticisms in the form Monnerot gives them in Sociologie du Communisme, which is the source also of the sentence in quotation marks (11) [Sociology of Communism, 11n1]. However, they match exactly aspects of Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalinism.

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it is forced to identify the current social system with society itself;122 and also, due to the negation that any values are absolute, to break with liberalism and with Christianity. It is also forced to elevate to a value, de facto, a technical instrument, democracy, with all the criticisms that this elevation implies: that by being democratic it is progressive but only because it is conservative, and so on. So, the historical result of Marxism is, on the one side, Communist reality, in the way it has become realized, and, on the other, the affluent society, in a non-dialectic form of opposition. From the standpoint of mere observation the data of the crisis seem to be the following: 1. In a certain sense, Marxism has already completely won, but only by negating itself most totally. Therefore, instead of speaking of the truth of Marxism, we must speak of its power of negativity, with respect to the positions it intended to surpass and sublate. 2. Therefore Marxism concludes with an insuperable contradiction ­precisely because of this power of negativity. Every attempt at surpassing or sublating it by the positions it criticized, which means all secular modern positions – since it formed within a vision of the course of history provided by Hegelianism, even though it has been naturally led to invert it – is impossible.123 Just as, on the other hand, it is impossible from the perspective of religious thought, b ­ ecause what can it mean, from that perspective, to sublate radical atheism as essence and not as accident? Can it be surpassed within Marxism itself? The Marxist intellectuals who must be taken seriously today (e.g., Bloch, Goldmann) must highlight the aspect of faith and hope, regarding the Stalinist and post-Stalinist moments as episodic. So, they have to move from Lenin’s encounter with pragmatism to

122 See essay IV. 123 It is impossible also from the standpoint of the two philosophies that Marxism did not expect within the horizon of German philosophy: that of Kierkegaard and that of Nietzsche (we already talked about the latter). This is the case because pure Kierkegaardism, unless it is developed in the direction of a reconciliation with tradition, splits into the two opposite positions of Shestov and Heidegger, with the necessary victory of the latter, whose philosophy is also, in a certain sense, a Nietzschean re-comprehension of Kierkegaard.

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an encounter with the religious philosophy of choice and meet, at the endpoint, Pascal’s pari. Thus, they represent the beginning of Marxism’s radical self-criticism. What the conclusion of this self-criticism might be is the question raised in this book. 3. But at the same time, because of this victory, there is the tragic ­situation of Christianity today, such as has never happened before: it is in a vise between two opposite types of society, which share a common origin, neither one of which is Christianizable. 4. A parallel situation holds for liberalism, which cannot reaffirm itself except by a total revision.

*** If the second Social Democratic crisis of Marxism means accepting the values of the affluent society, and if the affluent society is characterized by “natural irreligion,” by the “loss of the sacred,” by the rejection of the dimension of tradition and of the past because all values have been determined to be relative to specific historical situations (essay IV), it follows that the choice that the success of atheism places in front of us is no longer between “socialism and barbarism.” Man, who has lost the dimension of the past and also that of the future because of the collapse of the revolutionary ideal, reduces to mens momentanea: today is the time when the moral disappearance of man is possible, when man can fall back to the animal level. The alternative takes a completely different sense from the one that had initially been proposed: it becomes “either moral suicide or cosmic suicide.”

12. The Nietzsche Problem This is where we face the Nietzsche problem. Should it not take centre stage in a study of atheism? It seems it should because, in him, the biblical accent that remained in Marx is entirely and consciously erased. What else does the theory of the eternal return mean, if not the destruction of the Judeo-Christian element that still informs with itself, in secularized form, the nineteenth-century visions of history that describe the process from Fall to final redemption? In this sense, his position is Marx’s exact antithesis and the affirmation, against universal equality, of the ideal of the Master counterposed to the Slave. The Superman is he who is capable of accepting the idea of eternal return and of willing

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it, of thus saying yes to being. Nietzsche did not know Marx, but in one of his letters he talks about “those stupid blunders à la Feuerbach.”124 There is certainly no doubt that he intentionally tried to realize the most radical form of atheism.125 Nonetheless, it is also true that today he is not generally perceived as an atheist. Is it not significant that the works by philosophers who in a certain sense continue his work, Jaspers and Heidegger,126 give his atheism very little space? We can say that Nietzsche’s place in a religious perspective is strictly symmetrical to Pascal’s place in a secular one. There is a “Pascal des incroyants” from Saint-Beuve to Brunschvicg and Goldmann: Pascal allegedly destroyed for good the previous and subsequent positions of “Christian” philosophy and politics, even though he remained a Christian because of his faith in Sacred History, and even though he intended to live Christianity in its absolute purity. Likewise, Nietzsche allegedly provided the elements for a rigorous critique of the rationalist positions, even though he remained an atheist because of his faith in the sciences of history – such as they had organized themselves in the 1800s – or in science in general, and even though he intended to live atheism in its purity. This parallel must be extended: just like the (questionable) judgment that Pascal’s thought represents the tragic moment of the Christian

124 In a letter to Indianist and Schopenhauerian philosopher Paul Deussen, cited by De Lubac, Drama, 42n74. 125 Löwith, “Il ‘Discorso della montagna’ anticristiano di Nietzsche.” 126 For Jaspers, see the short book Nietzsche et le Christianisme (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1949), in which Nietzsche is presented as “a man who seeks God without understanding himself any longer.” See also the older, much longer work Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) in which he discusses Nietzsche’s self-destruction of his interpretation of the world as pure immanence. For Heidegger, see the (certainly paradoxical) sentence cited by Löwith in “Il ‘Discorso della montagna’ anticristiano di Nietzsche” (112), which says that Nietzsche was “the only believer of the nineteenth century.” We must also remember how frequent Nietzschean themes occur in the works of Enrico Castelli. When he dedicated the issue of Archivio di filosofia for Pascal’s centenary to Pascal and Nietzsche his intention was certainly not to set them in opposition (see the introduction). Adolfo Muñoz Alonso has pointed out very correctly (in Il problema dell’ateismo, Atti del XVI Convegno di Gallarate [Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962]) that Nietzsche’s influence on today’s atheism is almost nil. What is widespread is the idea, which goes back to Scheler, that his thought is a starting point to rediscover values in their authenticity, and Heidegger’s idea that Nietzsche was a victim of the long error of Western thought while at the same time he pushed it to its ultimate consequences.

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vision does not mean that it can be directly continued in atheistic form, so the (unquestionable) fact that Nietzsche’s thought represents the critical crisis of atheism does not mean that it can be Christianized. Let us now restrict ourselves to two brief observations, one on the nature of the opposition between the thought of Nietzsche and that of Marx,127 and one on the possibility or not of its development in a religious direction. On the first point: Can we trace the opposition between Nazism and Communism back to the opposition between his thought and that of Marx, which is completely unbridgeable? It is certainly hard to think that Nietzsche would have recognized himself in Hitler. However, one faces a similar difficulty juxtaposing Marx and Stalin since Stalin represents the precise inversion of Marx’s position, and the process of deterioration has continued. Nor is there any reason to rule out that the heterogenesis of ends can also apply to Nietzschean atheism. If we use, as people have done so often,128 Hegel’s text of the Master and the Slave as a guide to illuminate the opposition between racism and Communism, it is easy to propose, and to support with texts, the idea that Nietzsche was a theoretician of the seigneurial society since he denied at once socialism, democracy, and Christianity (to him the abrupt end of the Renaissance due to Luther, the decline of the French aristocracy, the French Revolution, political democracy, and socialism are all new forms of the “Christian epidemics”). Moreover, we cannot completely set aside, in the literature on Nietzsche, Alfred Baumler’s book,129 which was published in 1931, at a time when Nazism could delude even serious intellectuals, as in fact happened, and nobody was able to predict the horrors down the road. However, we must also remark that the relationship was of a completely different nature than that between Marxism and Communism. Let us recall what I have already said about the Nazi effort to free German culture, in order to preserve the idea of Germany’s primacy,

127 On this point, and against the Enlightenment-oriented interpretations of Nietzsche à la Kaufmann, the remarks by Lukàcs in The Destruction of Reason are rigorously correct. 128 See G. Fessard, De l’actualité, 1:130–52. Father Fessard has written the most interesting things on this topic, a true philosophical introduction to a deeper study of the problem. 129 Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931).

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from what in it had led to Marxism – the condemnations of Christianity and of the pessimism that hampers the cult of action being consequences of that first condemnation. In this situation, the encounter with Nietzsche seemed necessary, but its nature is precisely what shows that Nietzsche cannot be entirely reduced to the function of precursor of Nazism. Explaining Nazism with Nietzsche instead of explaining it as a backlash against Stalinism is, at least from one angle, complete nonsense.130 The very way in which Marx is related to Communism and Nietzsche to Nazism is another proof of their complete opposition, even though it is still true that Nietzsche cannot avoid the encounter, and so one cannot discuss Nazism without talking about Nietzsche. As mythical as the Nazi ideologies may have been, they could not but use a language derived from Nietzsche. Still, his thought is more than just an anticipation of Nazism. This is why in contrast to Lukàcs’s Nietzsche there is Heidegger’s Nietzsche, the prophet of our time as the final stage of the “forgetfulness of being,” of the consequent full unfolding of the will to power and of its expression in the technical age. He is the interpreter of a crisis that cannot be solved by merely political means, and even less by sociological or psychological therapies. According to Goldmann,131 Sein und Zeit is largely a discussion in implicit form, and in opposition, of Lukàcs’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein – namely, a metaphysical opposition to Lukàcs’s historicism, having in mind the same situation of man. This assertion, which I did not check out, seems to contain an element of truth. Anyway, Heidegger’s recent Nietzsche is the exact counterpoint to Lukàcs’s Nietzsche, even though, obviously, he could not know it (Heidegger’s texts date back to 1936–46, while Lukàcs’s work was published in 1954). And we must say that it marks Heidegger’s victory over Lukàcs. The major cultural outcome of Nazism has been to separate Nietzsche the guide for action from Nietzsche the prophet; and the latter is not swept away at all by the collapse in which the former is undoubtedly involved. Next, let us tackle the question whether a religious development of Nietzsche’s thought is possible. Clearly, a priori, my answer can only be 130 This is the real, very serious flaw of Lukács’s book, from which the tendentiousness of the whole work derives. 131 La Communauté humaine et l’Univers chez Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), xxi.

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negative. This simply because atheism, in the proper sense, is the terminal, no longer surpassable, point of a line of thought that must be judged at its roots. In reference to Nietzsche we can speak of a tragic crisis of atheism, in the sense that a total negation of Christianity, without preserving anything – the quest, in other words, for anti-Christianity with no longer even a single heretical aspect – means negation not only of atheism but also of religiosity, and concludes in a position that is no longer livable and, thus, in madness. This suffering – which is inherent to atheism developed to its extreme consequences, to the denial of religiosity as a human surrogate of transcendent religion – is what has often led people to think of a possible inversion of Nietzsche’s thought into “authentic” Christianity. But the conditions for this inversion are completely lacking. If we wish to indulge the taste for slightly baroque analogies, since Goldmann has talked, incorrectly, about a tragic crisis of religious thought taking place in Pascal, we should say, by analogy, that Marx is the St Thomas of atheism and Nietzsche is its Pascal. But we should not insist on these parallels. Rather, let us observe that the same considerations that people use to try and water down Nietzsche’s atheism are by necessity exactly those that are used to water down Marx’s atheism. Namely: the God he fought is the false God of philosophers; the Christianity he targeted is decayed Christianity; in the course of his unconscious quest to restore authentic Christianity he was misled by Schopenhauer, just as Marx was supposedly misled by Hegel. We are back at the reduction of atheism to a critique of the philosophical God and at the subsequent positive assessment of atheism as a process towards the religious God. Furthermore, one can point out that, whereas Marx discovered atheism in the act of opening Hegel’s philosophy to the future, for Nietzsche atheism is, instead, something he “observed” by considering the spiritual life of his time. We can say that a certain interpretation, which he did not call into question, of the development of thought led him to declare the “death of God” because the God such culture talked about was no longer the religious God. Moreover, the “tragic” character of his thought can only be explained by the antithesis between the truth-seeker and the theoretician of the pseudo-religion of Life, of the reduction of truth to creation of values. He did not live his own reduction of truth to myth: nobody embodied the type of the seeker of a truth that cannot be reduced to myth more than he did.

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In order to show that the religious reinterpretation of Nietzsche is delusional, we have available a definitive, rigorously conducted experience. Thus, it is just a matter of illustrating its failure. Let me give at least a first sketch. I am talking about Lev Shestov’s philosophy. The author of the best among the histories of Russian philosophy, Zenkovsky,132 characterizes its meaning most exactly: “he is the only philosopher in the world who picked up again Nietzsche’s essential theme and unearthed its religious meaning,” helped by the equally strong influence of Dostoevsky. He sought to be the only “Christian philosopher of the modern age” who tried to build a philosophy based on revelation. He waged an implacable war against the “secularist system,” the irreligious and anti-religious philosophy of our time. The task he proposed to himself was to free religious thought from all the infiltrations of rationalist thought that have befallen religious philosophy over the centuries. Therefore Zenkovsky views him as the greatest Russian philosopher of our century, in the sense of being the most significant continuer of Solovev’s direction. And I truly think we can say that his thought represents the end point of the line that, by appealing (in Solovev) to the second Schelling, going through an extension of his anti-Hegelianism in a religious direction encountered Dostoevsky. Except that Shestov substituted Nietzsche for Schelling. Because of this substitution the anti-Hegelianism of Russian thought takes the form of a philosophy of existence. Here we must point out something that has gone largely unnoticed – namely, that in the philosophy of the Russian emigration we find the first chapter of the philosophy of existence. The renaissance of Dostoevsky preceded in time that of Kierkegaard. It is very important to investigate the reasons it was defeated and today is almost forgotten. Investigating these origins of the philosophy of existence sheds more light on its character, including with regard to its relationship with Marxism. On this topic, we ought to consider something that I do not think has ever been noticed – namely, the curious parallel, by antithesis, between the thought of Shestov and that of Lenin. Both are very hostile to “backward looking” philosophy, speculative philosophy. “Philosophy

132 Histoire de la philosophie russe, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 337–50.

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is not Besinnen but struggle.”133 But what Shestov looks forward to is the retrieval, erasing faith in reason, of Edenic freedom. Lenin also looks forward to liberation from evil but through the revolution, as, at the same time, a historical and a philosophical fact. In Russian thought, from Solovev onward, a decisive battle took place in the war between Hegel and the anti-Hegelian tradition, from Schelling to Dostoevsky, ultimately also including Nietzsche, but in the end the winner was Hegel. We also ought to highlight the radical antithesis between Shestov and the first Russian philosopher who received some attention in the West – Spir. Spir viewed God in terms of his moral attributes, regarded as contradictory to his “physical” attributes. Hence his dualism between God the redeemer and God the creator, the dualism that found its definitive final formulation, as I have already said, in Martinetti. In Shestov, on the contrary, God is viewed in the aspect of power and arbitrary will, sacrificing, in the final analysis, his moral attributes. This, however, makes sense as a reaffirmation of the God “of miracles” against the God “subjected to order” of Martinetti’s religious rationalism.134 Above all, it makes sense as an explication of the connection between the affirmation of the reality of the individual and that of the supernatural. The problem of the possible religious development of Nietzsche finds its necessary form in the relationship Nietzsche-Dostoevsky. Of these two typical brothers-enemies, as Fr De Lubac correctly calls them, recalling the very effective sentence by Daniel Halévy, “each of the two men loves what the other loves not, but each of them detests what the other detests.”135 Now, Shestov wants to reconcile them through a radical development of the anti-rationalism of both: the critique of rationalism by Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” and Nietzschean irrationalism. By doing so he identifies the critique of rationalism with irrationalism, thus interpreting “reason” in the sense it takes in rationalism. Nietzsche is not seen in his effective historical situation as a thinker who sets

133 See Shestov’s major work, Athènes et Jérusalem (Paris: Vrin, 1938), 462–5 [TN: Athens and Jerusalem (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 1966), 440–3. The quote is on page 443, which is also the last in the book]. 134 See his essay “Ragione e fede” of 1934, the theoretical premise of Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo, republished in Ragione e Fede, saggi religiosi (Turin: Einaudi, 1942). 135 D. Halévy, Nietzsche (Paris: Grasset, 1944), 457, cited by De Lubac, Drama, 285n3.

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himself in opposition to Schopenhauer by rigorously explicating the latter’s aspect of novelty; rather, he is made to engage in dialogue only with Dostoevsky, so that he appears to be a thinker who lacked the courage to take the final step that his thought would have required. However, the result confirms perfectly the perspective I expressed above: it is a mind-blowing re-comprehension of the thought of Dostoevsky in that of Nietzsche; it demonstrates, in a certain sense, a complete defeat in front of Nietzsche’s atheism. Consider, indeed: irrationalism and the critique of rationalism denote two entirely different essences. There is only one way to try to unify them, namely, by transforming the critique of rationalism into the negation of reason; and, as a consequence, by setting in opposition faith and reason, in an absolute way. Accordingly, Shestov characterizes Nietzsche’s thought as a sort of metaphysical anarchism: as a revolt against necessary and eternal truths, a revolt that includes not only metaphysics as a science but also morals. In other words, extending the “critique of reason,” substituting Dostoevsky’s “critique of reason” for that of Kant, implies arriving at “beyond good and evil.” In this process Shestov becomes entirely Nietzsche’s captive, so captive that he even models his style after Nietzsche’s – hence the very peculiar appearance taken by a religious philosophy written in Nietzschean language.136 And yet this sequence of concessions is the obligatory route in order to expunge what is actually the denouement of Nietzsche’s thought, which, however, cannot be assimilated in any way by a religious philosophy: the eternal return, the amor fati. Indeed, if one takes the essence of Nietzsche’s thought to be the revolt against necessity and the fight against evidence, then one can view the thesis of the eternal return as the point where his critique did not go all the way. In the end Nietzsche accepted rationalism’s classical thesis that freedom lies in recognizing necessity, in necessity understood; he accepted, that is, the philosophy of “slavery” against his affirmation of the “morality of the masters,” which, in Shestov’s metaphysical transposition, means liberation from necessity. Supposedly, Nietzsche was the only one of the German philosophers who, having recognized that Socrates exemplifies the fallen man, issued to modern philosophy a challenge akin to the one that St Augustine 136 Thus, for example, speculative philosophy, which denies the religious God, is called by him “edifying” philosophy because it leads to justifying and “blessing” as necessary the horrors of being.

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had issued to the world by criticizing the virtue of pagans, and rediscovered the meaning of Luther’s attack against reason. His anti-­ Christianity is explained by the fact that medieval philosophers, and then the Christian philosophers of the modern era, from Leibniz to Hegel, surrendered to the concupiscentia irresistibilis of reason. However, his revolt came to an end: “Luther’s hammer struck more powerfully and more accurately than Nietzsche’s.” It was Luther who pushed to its ultimate consequences the revolt against reason, arriving at sola fide. Nietzsche aimed at the same goal and opened up for us the road to rediscover Luther. But the seduction of necessity bewitched him again, and here is his tragedy: he inserted into a philosophy of necessity an experience of thought that was, on the contrary, “a revolt against necessity.”137 He failed to distinguish the two dimensions of thought, that of reason and that of faith. But let us examine the sequence of contradictions in which Shestov is forced to entangle himself, which demonstrates precisely that his religious reinterpretation of Nietzsche has turned into its opposite. Consider, first of all, his connection to Luther. Luther presupposes German mysticism: the thesis that the just man lives by faith is the final stage of this process. That is, his arbitrarism – regardless of the criticisms that can be made against it, which explain the positive value of the theology of the Catholic Reformation – reflects an absolute theocentrism. Even less is Shestov’s position related to Descartes’s and Pascal’s so-called theological voluntarism, which is not arbitrarism but the affirmation that the divine nature is mysterious. Arbitrarism discovered after Nietzsche is, instead, entirely different: God becomes the Absurd. One cannot even say that he exists because then one would immediately lose him. No apologetics is possible because the only man who can see the truth is he who seeks it for himself but not for others, and who makes a solemn vow not to turn his visions into a judgment obligatory for all; who, that is, does not make truth tangible and instrumentalizable because by doing so he would confuse the metaphysical dimension with that of science. Truth reveals itself only to the individual, and, if communicated, it becomes part of the omnitudo. Therefore, seeking God

137 For the parallel between Luther and Nietzsche, which is the crucial point of his thought, see above all the very interesting pages 173–98 of Athènes et Jérusalem [TN: Athens and Jerusalem, 204–25].

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can only mean realizing the thought that “there is no impossible” since divine freedom is not bound by any necessity. But, at this point, does not Leibniz’s famous criticism of theological arbitrarism – the criticism that led him to recognize that its ultimate outcome is Spinoza, and effectively to break with Luther (which is the break preserved in classical German philosophy)138 and to discover the value of the Jesuit theologians – take again its full value? Indeed, what is the difference between this God deprived of moral attributes and nature deprived of laws? And what does Shestov’s faith reduce to if not to will to power, to realizing the thought that there is no impossible? The supernatural notion of miracle is replaced by the Renaissance notion of natural miracle. In other words, qualifying God as the Absurd leads to confusing religion and magical thought. From Shestov’s perspective, the service to God proper to religion can only be replaced by a use of God not in the sense of reducing God to a guarantor of science but, rather, in the sense of magical thought. Within religious thought, criticizing autonomous morality is certainly legitimate. But actually Shestov criticizes not only autonomous morality but morality tout court because no morality can be derived from his form of religion. In his extreme opposition, he remains completely subordinate to rationalism. “It is not a matter of describing freedom but of willing it.” What he opposes is descriptive philosophy because such philosophy loses the existent. Hence his antithesis to, but at the same time his admiration for, Husserl because allegedly he confessed that existence is not the object of philosophy rationalistically understood. However, did Shestov realize this idea that “for God everything is possible,” this breach of the “wall of necessity”? Or, at least, does it appear from his work that he tried to realize it? Being so cut off from practice, what does his philosophy become? Nothing but precisely what it did not intend to be – a phenomenology of religion. Moreover, a phenomenology of religion

138 Therefore Shestov is right when he points out the break with Luther on the part of classical German philosophy. The way in which the modern period of German philosophy is accompanied, at its beginning in Leibniz, by a rediscovery of the positivity of the Catholic Reformation is a theme worth an in-depth study, even though it has been discussed by various scholars, albeit generally with an inadequate perception of its importance.

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that does not account for religious forms because it is unable to distinguish religion from magic. The fight against evidence and against necessity takes the appearance of a cosmic revolt. People have often talked about the Stirnerian elements in Nietzsche. Now, this transition from Nietzsche to Stirner curiously becomes realized in Shestov’s thought. I already mentioned the possible transition from Stirner to Kierkegaard, but in Shestov we have a sort of slide from Kierkegaard to Stirner turned into a religious thinker but without ceasing to be Stirner. From the historical standpoint, is not his book on Kierkegaard precisely that? In order to transform religious thought, he had to give up on evidence, necessity, and morality as meaningful terms in religious thought and had to relinquish them to rationalist thought, accepting completely the meaning this latter gives them. By totally forsaking evidence, he sacrificed communicability; by totally forsaking necessity, he effectively also sacrificed miracles, giving them the magic significance that is proper to rationalism. But, even more, by exalting divine omnipotence he actually ended up limiting it to a degree that had never occurred in theistic thought. This is because the Serpent, who, with his advice, was able to change human nature, enslaving it to necessity, effectively created another nature: he became as powerful as God.139 If we consider Shestov in his relation to Nietzsche, we can say that in him we find not a theistic surpassing but somehow theism inside Nietzschean atheism. If we consider him in relation to Hegel – in whom, consistently, he must see the unsurpassable endpoint of rationalism – we find again complete subordination because he totally accepts the Hegelian history of philosophy. The only difference is that for him Hegel’s history is the history of false philosophy – that is, the history of the surrender to the temptation of reason, which in the history of thought was avoided only in exceptional cases, namely, in the very thinkers whom Hegelian history cannot include: Tertullian, St Peter Damian, Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche. But then, his descriptions of these thinkers do not match the historical realities, even though on Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky he was able to make really stimulating comments.

139 This last point has been highlighted very astutely by M.F. Sciacca, La filosofia oggi (Milan: Marzorati, 1958), 455–6. It is truly curious how this intransigent adversary of gnosticism ends up, as Sciacca also observes, in a form of semi-Manicheanism.

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Nonetheless, his has been a truly authentic attempt, conducted with extreme rigour and consistency. In his attempt to develop Nietzsche’s thought in a religious sense, Shestov had the courage to reach the ultimate consequences. Therefore, it is possible to extract from it some highly positive aspects. One needs to sort out the general framework, the reduction of atheism to a critique of the philosophical God, and thus to a position that can be sublated from the perspective of religious philosophy. His thought represents, as we have seen, the definitive selfrefutation of this thesis. However, to the extent that the philosophy of existence sets itself against Spinozism as acosmism,140 which is an aspect he pushed to the extreme, his philosophy contains a critique of rationalism as negation of the supernatural that is so hardly paradoxical that its features can agree very well with those spelled out by Laporte in the definition I mentioned earlier. In the final analysis they are a clarification of Pascal’s interpretation of the atheistic option, after the rise of the great systems of metaphysical rationalism and after their atheistic extensions. In all its forms, rationalism is characterized by hatred for the individual and by confusing religious spirituality with this negation of individuality.141 Consequently, the starting point of philosophy is viewed to be man’s elevation through thought to such universality that his existence in finite life becomes indifferent to him. Hegel adds that this indifference should be felt even more as a duty by a Christian. In the metaphysics of rationalism finite individuality is resolved into a moment in the process of being. In the logic of rationalism the primary characteristic of truth is its necessity as capacity to force me, whether I want it or not. In the ethics of rationalism an action is good to the extent that it is the volition of the universal, and it acquires value from the sacrifice of my 140 And against Hegel in his Spinozian aspect, in the name of the reality of the individual. This is why he was led to believe in the possibility of a religious sublation of Nietzsche as an anti-Spinozian [TN in the original this is a parenthetical statement in the main text]. 141 We have seen, for example, how confidently the rationalist Brunschvicg – following in the tracks of his all-time favourite author, Spinoza – during his discussion with Marcel identified religious spirituality with “total detachment from one’s own person,” which is “the ascesis proper to a scientist”; or how Hegel carries out what Maritain calls “the dialectic immolation of the person”; or the replacement of I by we in Marxism, the endpoint of the rationalistic reduction of the individual to selfish will, in the perspective of thought related to the notion of Gattungwesen.

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individuality. Any ethics that makes the realization of individuality a goal, even with the sacrifices it implies, will always look suspicious to a rationalist. In theological rationalism (meaning Malebranche and Leibniz in the forms that intend to remain within orthodoxy; Kant and Hegel in those that step out of it) theology will tend to forbid God from performing miracles because by being performed in favour of the individual they presuppose a violation of the order that must govern God’s will, even though in orthodox forms this negation of miracles is dissimulated. This order becomes emancipated from God, a norm that constrains his thought and his will. Hegel draws the conclusions, and this order becomes a synonym for God. Now, this negation of individuality implies a choice about the nature of evil, does it not? Evil is located in the very finiteness of existence, so that guilt becomes ontological, inscribed in the very structure of finite being. Thus, the choice that conditions all the categories and the whole development of rationalism is the rejection of the vision of sin presented in the book of Genesis. The religious critique that demolishes the Bible, reducing it to legendary tales, is actually a consequence of this choice. The biblical explanation that says that we introduced evil into the world by an act of freedom is replaced by another explanation that regards as necessary the link between finiteness and death. Thereby one returns essentially to the explanation of evil contained in the fragment of Anaximander; and since the historicity of original sin escapes an objective representation, philosophies constitute themselves on the basis of a choice about the unverifiable. Therefore a religious philosophy independent of faith is impossible. The criterion of truth for both rationalism and religious philosophy will be the liberation of the person. Now, the fact that Shestov saw in atheism, which he considered only in Nietzsche, a criticism of the philosophical God (“When Nietzsche proclaimed that we have killed God, he expressed briefly the conclusion to which the millennial development of European thought had led”) had the effect that he identified rationalism with speculative philosophy, and religious philosophy with the philosophy of existence. Rationalism is determined to be the philosophy of the comprehension and justification of being; religious thought is determined to be the philosophy of existence understood as a quest for liberation from necessity. In actuality, the proper thesis of rationalism is the mortality of the finite, and then it is clear that its final step must be the critique, within itself, of speculative philosophy. Here we have the transition from Hegelian rationalism

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to Marxist rationalism, from the ultimate form of philosophy as justification to philosophy as revolution. On the other hand, the conception of the mortality of the finite can be viewed in an optimistic sense if we take the standpoint of dialectics and progress, in a pessimistic sense if we consider the perennial horrors to which the individual is subjected. Hence the break, within the rationalist presupposition itself, between rationalism and irrationalism. The latter is a brother-enemy of the former precisely because it does not criticize its presupposition and thus unfolds not as its critique but as its irreconcilable mirror image. Hence the two opposite forms of atheism in which nineteenth-century thought concludes, that of Marx and that of Nietzsche. Hence, also, the historical conclusion of the former in nihilism, of the latter in the description of this same nihilism but without overcoming it. I mentioned the peculiar symmetry, in opposition, between Shestov and Lenin, which Shestov could not have predicted anyway since, for him, rationalism had necessarily to take the form of speculative philosophy. Now, if, as I said, rationalism must instead move beyond the form of speculative philosophy – because of its character of being a theologization of the finite, which implies the reification of subjects (and the protest by the philosophy of existence, which however must remain apolitical) – it is clear that the development of the definition of rationalism proposed by Shestov must arrive exactly at the interpretation of Marxism advanced by the first Lukàcs142 – which, as I have already said, was the development to the ultimate consequences of the sentence by Engels on the proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy. Peculiarly, I went through this process myself in my 1946 essay, reprinted here. I was commenting precisely on the Theses on Feuerbach, with the aid of the definition of rationalism provided to me by Shestov, which I subsequently developed into the thesis of the inversion of the idea of homo sapiens into the idea of homo faber, which is necessary for rationalism when it reaches its final stage. At that time I just vaguely

142 Namely, critique of revisionism, critique of Kantian morality, affirmation that materialism is necessary as the condition to transition to the revolutionary meaning of dialectics, critique of the system as a philosophical form linked with justifying reification, the idea of the unity of theory and praxis, the idea of the party as their unification, identification in the party of history and social progress, the category of Totality, characterization of the revolutionary through totalism [TN: in the original this footnote is a parenthetical statement].

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knew Lukàcs by name, through a citation by Berdaev, and it was not easy to find in Italy the tools for a precise philological knowledge of Marx as a philosopher. Such knowledge was more hampered than helped by the commentaries of the old revisionists (Bernstein, Mondolfo, Vorländer, Baratono, etc.), and let this be said with all due respect for the seriousness of their works and for the honesty of the exigency that moved them. The idea that Marx had permanently been surpassed by Croce was still prevalent,143 and knowledge of his philosophy was ­hindered even more by the new commentaries coming from Stalinist dialectic materialism. But how did I meet Shestov’s thought? Young Catholic scholars in the 1930s felt divided by conflicting affections. Blondel’s thought was still having its effects because it expressed an insuppressible need: the quest to define the “creation of creators” and “man’s cooperation with God.” On the other side there was Maritain’s exemplary experience in the ethical-political field. He was the philosophical interpreter of one of the greatest critiques of the modern world, that offered by Léon Bloy. I said “exemplary” because after, or by virtue of, having lived fully the anti-modern, he had been able to separate it completely from the nineteenth century forms of reactionary thought. Then there was Kierkegaard’s influence, and its aspect of truth, which seemed indispensable. For all of us there was also some temptation to heterodoxy, which for me was not represented at all by Croce, who at that time seemed to me entirely a non-philosopher,144 nor by Gentile but, rather, by the dualistic and heretical thought of Martinetti. So, I had been gearing up to study the formation process of the philosophy of action, motivated by the idea of a reconciliation between Blondel and Thomism, and of course the disposition more natural to my way of thinking was to study it from the angle of the vision of history 143 Regarding the state of the studies on theoretical Marxism in Italy in 1946, see my review “Studi intorno alla filosofia di Marx,” in Rivista di Filosofia 3-4 of that year (223–33), in which I gave the emphasis it deserves to the new trend that was beginning with the works of Della Volpe. 144 In fact, I don’t think his philosophical significance can be understood except in the antithesis to his always-present adversary, Marx – who is always present, mind you, in his genuine meaning, even though it is suspected rather than understood, and even though, in order to surpass him, Croce is forced to alter him. This is why I could not understand Croce until after I knew Marxism [TN: in the original this is a parenthetical statement].

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it proposed. Therefore I began by studying the first philosopher whom the philosophy of action had tackled at its beginning – Malebranche (in the book by Ollé-Laprune of 1870). I saw the problem of the relationship between faith and reason as central to his thought, as decisive to defining the nature of his reform of Cartesian thought. This led me naturally to study the relations between faith and reason in Descartes and here, besides encountering Gouhier, I was attracted by Laberthonnière’s interpretation. He must be given credit for having been the first to study the philosophy of Descartes as a philosophy of life and not as a mere reflection on the nature of the new science; for having been the first who tried to relive Descartes’s “present” instead of trying to define the way in which he was a precursor of the future or deviated from the past. But how to separate the aspect of truth from the tendentiousness, which is also evident, of his study of 1909, upon which all his other Cartesian works depend, Le dualisme Cartésien? Through a very long tour of the whole Cartesian world, focused above all on investigating Malebranche’s partial failure to build a post-Cartesian “Christian philosophy,” I came to recognize that the foundation of all Cartesian dualisms is the original duality, which is not made directly explicit, between spiritual life and history. I felt I had found in this first dualism the common encompassing context within which all the thinkers who can truly be called Cartesian (Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, partially Geulincx) operate.145 But even while I was conducting this research, my question was how to overcome the gnostic-Manichean temptation. In that respect, the thinkers I was studying were not very useful. I can say now that Shestov was for me what another Russian philosopher, Afrikan Spir, was for Martinetti. His thesis about metaphysical rationalism made it possible for me to dissociate the individualistic aspect of Martinetti’s thought from the Kantian-Spinozian form of religiosity and,146 subsequently, to tackle Marxism.

145 See my study “Cartesio e la politica,” in Rivista di Filosofia 41 no. 1 (1950): 3–30, regarding which, one must not be misled by the title, as if the problem concerned a marginal aspect of the Cartesian question. 146 That is, it made it possible for me to rediscover the idea of the individual as the decisive Christian category in the sense that Kierkegaard talks about it. So that we can also recognize the “decline” of Christianity in what determines the process that led to the affirmation that it was the species – mankind – that discovered Christianity.

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This clarifies the extreme closeness, and at the same time the difference, between my thought and that of Enrico Castelli, who had also encountered Kierkegaard in Shestov’s form before directly reading his works,147 during an investigation aimed at reaffirming Blondel and Varisco after Gentile. Of course he arrived at a form of thought that is profoundly original compared to that of Shestov because, also according to Castelli, the positive aspect in Shestov lies only in the definition and critique of rationalism, and because of the different adversary. However, Castelli has remained indifferent to the philosophical significance of Marxism, I think, to the extent that he has judged, like Spirito, that the Marxist motif has been surpassed in Gentile’s Idealism. Once this is granted, one will certainly move on to a rigorous critique of Actualism but will not pose the question of the history of philosophy as a problem. This also explains what distinguishes me from Ugo Spirito, a thinker to whom I am attached because we share a constant connection between philosophical problems and political problems, and also because I admire his profound consistency, despite the variety of positions in which his thought has been formulated. For him such plurality was morally required in order to stay faithful to his original starting point, without making any concession to fashions. However, there is only one question that he has not problematized – namely, the vision of modern history as a process of secularization. He did not do that because, from the perspective he has taken on the Gentile-Marx problem, he did not have to do it. The judgment about Gentile is also what

147 This was one of the very rare encounters of Western philosophy with Shestov’s thought. Let us recall, besides his, that of Albert Camus, with regard to which one should study in depth Wahl’s critical proposal, which interprets it as a form of secularization of Shestov. Let us also recall Benjamin Fondane, who died young in a concentration camp, and who is known above all for extremely penetrating studies on Rimbaud and Baudelaire; however, what would deserve to be re-read is his collection of philosophical essays La conscience malheureuse (Paris: Denöel et Steele, 1936). According to Fondane, “Shestov begins where Heidegger ends.” This judgment is incorrect because, on the contrary, Heidegger begins precisely after Shestov’s failure. Nonetheless, the very meaning of this opposition led Fondane to write an essay titled Heidegger devant Dostoievski, which is extremely singular and perhaps unique in the literature on Heidegger because it curiously predicts and anticipates the subsequent development of his thought.

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leads to avoiding this problematization in a thinker as “problematic” as Gustavo Bontadini.148

13. Order of Research The considerations I have presented thus far explain why the form I had to give this book, which seems peculiar, was indeed necessary. Allow me to say that it is a collection not of essays but of contracted books.

148 Accepting the victory of Gentile over Marx – instead of that particular type or relationship I outlined earlier – seems to me a common feature of these three philosophers, who are, peculiarly, both close and very different. We have seen that when one grants that Idealism is ulterior to every materialism, one cannot problematize the periodization schemes of the history of philosophy. Spirito affirms such ulteriority explicitly: “The history of thought does not stop at Marx, but from Marx moves on towards the new Idealism, towards Actualism, without being able, of course, to stop even at this final outcome of the Hegelian tradition” (page 166 of “Gentile e Marx,” in Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 26, nos. 1–2 [1947]: 145–66). So does Castelli, implicitly: “when modern thought, and the final expression of this thought, Idealism, talks about theology, it intends to talk about a transcendental I which, in the final analysis, is inseparable from an empirical I; an empirical I who realizes himself as a position of the transcendental I … The merit of Idealism has been consistency, which led it to the doctrine of the single subject … Can solipsism be eliminated? Personally I think so … But the critique of solipsisms is simultaneously the critique of Idealism” (Existentialisme theologique [Paris: Hermann, 1948], 75–6). So that the history of modern philosophy must be thought, à la Kierkegaard, as the history of a race towards solitude to the same exact extent that it intends to be a history of the quest for objectivity at all cost. See I presupposti di una teologia della storia (Milan: Bocca, 1952). Now I agree perfectly with Castelli as far as the definition of rationalism is concerned: it is a philosophy of the “loss of the conditional” (I presupposti, 9), as suppression of the history of the self, which erases the awareness of an initial fall. It is a philosophy of the “naturalness of death” (I presupposti, 89), with the consequent characterization of thought in terms of comprehension by impotence (by the impossibility to think the opposite) and the reduction/confusion of evidence (the expression of a light) to incontrovertibility (the expression of a constriction, of the fact of “having one’s back to the wall”), a thesis that affirms the positivity of Dostoevsky’s critique of reason. But I part ways with him when he sees in Idealism, and in its solipsist catastrophe, the ultimate outcome of rationalism. Regarding Bontadini’s stance with respect to Idealism, see the essay “L’essenza dell’idealismo come essenza della filosofia moderna,” in Studi sulla filosofia dell’età cartesiana (Brescia: La Scuola, 1947). On Actualism in particular, see “Gentile e noi,” in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 26 (1947): 167–88. Is it a legitimate question whether the irreducibility of the three philosophies depends precisely on the common presupposition? I will discuss this in a subsequent study.

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But it was not possible for me to do otherwise because it was a matter of illustrating the necessary interdependence of a sequence of problems that are apparently unrelated and only partially solved to this day. Certainly, the order would have been different, and much more similar to the usual one, if I had been able to start from a philosophy that I held as absolutely certain. Because of what I have already explained, no other route was open to me other than an investigation of philosophy through history. Given this, the obligatory order – obligatory because the starting point had to be the historical actuality – could only be the following: •

•

•

•

•

the realization that atheism is essential to Marxism, together with the recognition of its philosophical significance, as the conclusion of rationalism and as the explicative principle of present reality in its totality (essays II and III); the necessity to trace back to Marxism, albeit indirectly, all forms of contemporary irreligion (essay IV); the critique of Maritain’s interpretation of atheism and the ­rediscovery of Pascal’s definition (essay V); the necessity for Marxism, in its critical form, to tackle the Pascal problem as central to its historical perspective, and the necessity for a discussion of the Marxist attempt to surpass Pascal. This leads me to assert the continuity of the philosophies of the Catholic nonscholastic thinkers of the 1600s and early 1700s (i.e., from Descartes to Vico) and to pose the problem of Ontologism in different terms than Carabellese, Lavelle, and Heidegger (essay VI); the correlation in Marxism between the primary philosophical ­adversary identified in theism or, more precisely, in the religious God, and the primary political adversary identified in liberalism, by reason of the correlation between the two negations and the ­reduction of individualism to egoism. This clearly implies a revision of the concept of liberalism and also of the stance that religious thought (and in particular Catholic thought) has taken towards it (essay VII).

The second and third essays are quite old. One was a lecture given at the Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia di Roma of November 1946, the other appeared in the October-December 1948 issue of Rivista di Filosofia. I reprinted them almost unchanged, except for minimal formal corrections. I was extremely hesitant in taking this decision because my first intention was, of course, to revise them and

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bring them up to date. However, given the huge number of works on Marxism that have appeared since, such an update would have required at least two volumes, a first one on Marxism and Catholic critics, and a second one more generally on Marxism and its critical literature. These works, of course, are needed, but they exceeded the plan I had laid down for this book. At any rate, mine is not a far out interpretation since it agrees perfectly with that of the early Lukàcs and with its extension in Goldmann.149 I also stated the criterion for establishing the erroneousness of the interpretations that diverge from it, which lies in the confusion between Feuerbach’s and Marx’s positions about atheism: this confusion is always lurking under the most varied and dissimulated guises. It seems to me that reprinting these essays is advisable first of all because of their significance as documents.150 Indeed, 1945 and 1946 were the formative years of all the positions, both cultural and political, that fully unfolded afterwards. In reference to those years, these writings take on the aspect of a document – certainly rare, and possibly the first, not only in Italy – of a self-criticism, not a criticism from outside, of the position of the Catholic left. Please forgive me for borrowing this term

149 Goldmann’s novelty with respect to Lukàcs is the following: “what corresponds to the dialectic conception of history at the level of individual consciousness is … the act of immanent faith in the manner of the wager” (Recherches dialectiques [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], 294). 150 At least in this regard, their significance was judged to be very remarkable even recently by E. Garin, La cultura italiana fra ‘800 e ‘900 (Bari: Laterza, 1962), 343. These writings were conceived in a fraternal concordia discors with Felice Balbo, who had gone through my same experience and who ended up essentially agreeing with my perspective, even if he developed its consequences differently. See his Idee per una filosofia dello sviluppo umano (Turin: Boringhieri, 1962). My interpretation of the crisis, and the problematic terms in which I defined it, was shared by L. Pareyson, a scholar so knowledgeable regarding the problems associated with the period between Hegel and Nietzsche, and so sensitive to historical concreteness. See his essay “Il problema del Marxismo” and also, because of similar problems, “Due possibilità: Kierkegaard e Feuerbach,” both in Esistenza e Persona (Turin: Taylor, 1950). See also Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1950), especially pages 54–5 and 71, and Fichte (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1950), lx–lxi, lxvii–lxviii. See also, because it fully understands and illustrates these texts, the nice review by N. Matteucci, “La cultura italiana e il marxismo dal 1945 al 1951,” in Rivista di Filosofia 44 (1953): 61–85, written after his remarkable, and perhaps not well enough known, Antonio Gramsci e la filosofia della prassi (Milan: Giuffré, 1951).

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from politics; but I already explained why today the link between philosophical discourse and political discourse is very tight. We must give Esprit and its founder Mounier credit for having already understood in 1932 that taking a stand on the crisis of civilization was the first condition for a renewal both of the philosophy and of the politics of Catholics, a renewal that began with Maritain and that I lived during the years from 1935 to 1945. As a matter of fact, Maritain had not exactly underestimated the importance of the atheistic aspect of Marxism – even though in my judgment he did not fully grasp its significance, nor does he grasp it now (essay VII). But many of those who were young at that time and who looked at him as a teacher, at least at the level of political thought – and who still today feel a deep gratitude for his work, even if they incline to disagree with it – had gone farther. Back then, the anti-Fascism of intellectuals seemed tied, in Italy, to Idealist culture and its derivatives. Was it absurd to see in Marx’s work the reaffirmation of a form of realism, which was certainly deficient because of the Hegelian influence and deformed into materialism, but which in principle could be dissociated from such Hegelian influence? Was it illegitimate to think that his anti-religious polemics targeted “bourgeois religion,” religion reduced to the defensive tool of a social order, the religion that Fascism also defended? Was it impossible to find in the criticism of this type of religion a convergence with the criticism of Maritain’s teacher, Leon Bloy? The criticism that Communism is atheistic seemed to freeze in a fixed figure a reality that, on the contrary, was developing. Besides a closed Marxism, it seemed possible to conceive an open Marxism, which would move not towards the Idealism it had definitively criticized but towards an encounter with a renewed Catholic thought. This was essentially the state of mind being expressed in Esprit and in its personalist program. It combined the influences of Kierkegaard and Marx. People who were very young in the early 1930s had found in Kierkegaard the true form of the critique of Idealism – in Italy against the philosophy of Croce’s works and against Actualism, and in France against a certain satisfied awareness in Brunschvicg’s vision of progress. But Kierkegaard was not exactly a guide for action in the years of the Fascist and Nazist offensive. People were rediscovering Marx while trying to address the need for a philosophy that was also action.151 151 T.W. Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard (1933) expresses well this possible transition to Marxism out of dissatisfaction for the “closure in private existence” and the “aestheticism” of Kierkegaard’s position.

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Now, already in 1945 this state of mind became for me an object of criticism, and the complete irreconcilability between Christianity and Marxism started to become evident to me. The break took place at the level of ethics (see pages 201ff) because,152 apart from it, Marxist atheism could certainly look like an eliminable superstructure, at least in principle. But in fact Marxism replaced, with perfect consistency, the idea of ethics with that of the philosophy of history, and replaced the opposition (in the former) between good and evil with the idea that evil is the only path that leads to goodness.153 It thus denied the whole Christian ethical tradition, up to its secularized translation in Kant. Such opposition was a consequence of the inversion whereby the idea of homo sapiens, in whose framework Hegelian philosophy had still been thought, had to be replaced by that of homo faber – namely, the ideal type that, as absolute negation of the theme of participation, leads to the refusal to see in man the image of God, while simultaneously it destroys, if it is inserted into Christian thought, every type of unity between it and Greek thought since the idea of homo sapiens is an “invention of the Greeks.”154 In this way I took the position exactly opposite to that of Mounier: there is no common ethical aspiration shared by Marxism and Christianity but, rather, expressly in the field of ethics, an irreparable opposition. But, at the same time, this perception of the contradiction between Christianity and Marxism was accompanied by the recognition that Marxism has enormous philosophical power, which earlier I had underestimated, and that it is one with its practical power. This led me to resolutely oppose the idea, which was current at the time, that Marxism was suitable for the Russian people because, not having experienced

152 I daresay that my reaction to the events of 1945 (the moral problems connected with the purge and so on) was entirely similar – regarding the philosophical problem it involved, that of the morality of history – to the reaction of Raymond Aron as described in the essay “La philosophie de l’histoire” in the collective volume edited by M. Farber titled L’activité philosophique en France et aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). See pages 338–40: “Is history the only dimension of human existence? … The time has come for the philosophy of history to rid itself of historical absolutism, which the Marxist tradition has inspired.” 153 See on this point Goldmann, Le dieu caché, 336 [The Hidden God, 301] and elsewhere. It is also from Goldmann that I take the terms of the opposition between philosophy of history and ethics. 154 Regarding the opposition between the ideas of homo sapiens and homo faber, ­pages 24–55 in Max Scheler’s L’homme et l’histoire (Paris: Aubier, 1955) [TN: “Man in History,” in Philosophical Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 65–93] keep all their value.

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humanism and modern civilization, it had leaped from the Middle Ages to Communism. In that specific formulation this idea was contradicted by the experience of the following years, but it is still around in the only apparently more adequate form that holds that Communism is a technique to rapidly accelerate technical progress in underdeveloped areas. I was also led to oppose the other idea that, in order to save its valid aspect, Marxism needed to be sublated in liberal socialism or in a renewal of Catholic culture. I was beginning to see in Marxism the type of radical atheism, shaping an absolutely new form of philosophy, that I discussed earlier. As a consequence, I was starting to view the unfolding of the essence of atheism as the general context within which the cultural and political forms that arose in the years after 1917 must be understood. Reflecting on the nexus of theory and practice, and on the fact that it expresses itself as a revolution that is simultaneously a philosophical event, in 1946 I wrote: The most significant fact of the two Fascist decades is this: the culture that thought it had surpassed Marxism in the realm of ideas, then found itself powerless to surpass it in practice; so the defense organized itself around ­irrational forces. Initially these forces met only limited resistance by the ­culture. One would hope, and this was the hope of many Italians during the first decade, that they could be bent to serve values, because their ideal void created the illusion that they were pure forces, amenable to be redirected. After people came to understand that they were positively directed against values … this understanding gave rise to a reaction with some peculiar features. First of all, this culture could not hope to overturn Fascism, and the confession of this impotence is represented by forms of neo-­ Manicheanism (Martinetti, Rensi). It condemns; it constitutes a society of beautiful souls  … Does not the doubt arise, then, that it was the culture of Fascism? In the sense that the Fascist period is marked by a dissociation between culture and politics? It is a dissociation and no longer a mere distinction, like in previous centuries of the modern age, when culture and politics were indeed distinct, but could be coordinated. Over those twenty years culture was not able to organize political forces, to make itself the form of a community; and political forces could not find an organizing principle, except by activating an insurrection of life against values. So that culture could only undermine the political organization, making its barbaric character manifest. Perhaps we should look into this complementarity of dissociated politics and

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culture to find the reason why there was no Fascist persecution against Croce … [I]t may be right to think that Fascism could not move against a culture which was, yes, opposed to it, but complementary … So Fascism is just the natural form that European politics took because European culture had not been able to truly surpass Marxism. Given that culture, only that politics was possible, even if it had the result of pushing men of culture away from itself, to isolate them into an indignant society.155

A brief note on the distinction I made then between the positions of Marx and Engels. The way in which Marxism was being received in European culture had the effect that in those years the focus of attention shifted to the young Marx and, thus, precisely to the expression of his thought, from which Marxism had removed its gaze during the Stalinist period. In fact, this is still the necessary form in which Marxism can act, and has acted since 1945, on Western thought – as a philosophy ulterior to Idealism and existentialism. This conjunction with previous existentialist thought expressed itself in a rigid distinction between Marx and Engels, which in that year I made my own (pages 180–3), even though I had already abandoned Marxism. I judged that both the Soviet form of dialectical materialism – which back then I viewed not as a necessary deterioration (as I view it today) but as a philosophically less appropriate expression, which, however, did not alter the essence of Marxism because it led to the same practical consequences – and also, by antithesis, revisionism in all its forms (both the ancient ones and those that started to appear at that time)156 depend on Engels. Hence the need for European Marxism to rigorously separate the position of Marx from that of Engels in order to beat revisionism. 155 “Attualità della filosofia di Marx?” in the Milanese journal Costume 2 (1946): 93–5. In that way I opposed the “tribunalistic” and “purgative” idea of a responsibility of culture since accusing philosophers of not having been able to really surpass Marxism or, according to a different taste, of not having been Marxist, makes no more sense than accusing a scientist of not having made certain discoveries. The fullest expression of the idea of responsibility thus understood is Lukàcs’s Destruction of Reason. The dissatisfaction one feels reading it, even while one must grant that it is a seriously thought out book, shows how much this idea is aberrant; and so is the (academic) idea of its irresponsibility, as if the fact that a philosophy is involved in a historical crisis should not affect our judgment of its theoretical value. 156 Above all in the form of joining together Marx and Dewey. But on the subject of this combination, see the remarks by E. Garin, La cultura italiana, 307ff.

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Of course, now I think that this judgment is insufficient. In fact, from the historical standpoint it is hard to explain why, if this was the case, all of Engels’s statements met Marx’s approval. Nonetheless, even though this judgment must be qualified because it is certainly excessive, I do not think that it is entirely unjustified. The full agreement between Marx and Engels was founded on the thesis that both of them placidly accepted because it conformed to nineteenth-century thought – namely, that history has the character of necessity. This aspect seems to be spelled out more clearly in Engels because of his tendency to be systematic. Indeed, one can hardly think of removing from nineteenth-century Marxism the idea of the “end of history,” transferred from the present to the future. I already said that the most critical form that Marxism can reach must consist in eliminating this image. Such elimination is necessary in order to answer the historicist objection, which Marx and Engels could not predict. Why did I not continue these studies on Marxism, even though I was authoritatively encouraged to do so also by judgments coming from people belonging to the opposite side?157 They still seem valid to me in their essential features, so much so that I think that, over the many years that passed since then, the literature on Marxism has reduced what at that time was a sketch and a program for future work into a summary of the essential writings that appeared afterwards. I did not continue them exactly because of the perspective I reached, whereby the nexus of theory and practice in Marxism implies that it cannot be judged independently of its historical realization; or, to be more precise, because the dialectic character of Marxist thought implies that every single concept and every single practical operation can be understood only in relation to totality and not in isolation from it. Which, in practice, means that Marxism can be seriously made an object of study only by an institute or by a team. In Italy no such effort was made either then or later – and we can see the consequences – due to the idea that all the science of an adversary of Communism boils down to the slogan,

157 See G. della Volpe, Per la teoria dell’umanesimo positivo (Bologna: Zuffi, 1949), now in Umanesimo positivo e emancipazione maxista (Milan: Sugar, 1964), 188. From della Volpe’s writings I drew, at that time, the decisive confirmation of the critique of revisionism and also, in particular, the falsehood of the thesis that Marxism is iusnaturalistic, which was very common at that time and is still frequently repeated today.

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which is actually entirely meaningless,158 “democracy against totalitarianism”; and due to the other idea that, by virtue of the already developed and forever defined critique of theoretical Marxism (!), the question of stopping the advance of Communism was merely practical – that is say, answerable in elementary terms. The fourth essay, previously unpublished, is intentionally skeletal because there have already been so many discussions regarding the connection between technology and the eclipse of the sacred, alienation in the contemporary world, the advent of “morality without sin,” and so on – the aspects that describe today’s Western world, in short – and they have been in such fundamental agreement, and, finally, they have been popularized so much by novelists and journalists that I felt I should limit myself to some hints. Conversely, what I really cared to show is that the matrix of contemporary irreligion, also concerning the Western world, is still Marxist. This in the sense that the rise of the affluent society – which cannot be reduced to any other society from the past, and which is necessarily irreligious because it fights Marxism not in its aspect of atheism but in that of religion, and which may have the practical capacity to achieve and maintain at least for some time so-called “peaceful co-existence” but only on the condition of making the abolition of poverty coincide with the highest degree of alienation – is marked precisely by the failure to ideally surpass Marxism. Not by chance its cultural expression is sociologism as absolute relativism – that is, in exact terms, objectivized Marxism. It is one of the sides of the 158 Indeed, it is very easy for a Communist to answer that, for his party, unlike for Nazism, totalitarianism is just a provisional situation, and that its goal is instead the highest degree of democracy, the stateless society, and that the transition is hard due to the fact that the passage from the world in which alienation reigns to the world of freedom marks a qualitative leap and thus needs the revolution and the morality of war; such hardship will progressively weaken to the extent that the new order will get established; the duration of the revolutionary process cannot be rigorously predicted since it is a revolution that will change the face of the earth; and so on. The opposition between democracy and totalitarianism is meaningless if it is pronounced independently of any reference to the problem of theism and atheism. People may counter that this position leads to confusing religion and politics and, thus, necessarily to the mentality of the wars of religion. This is not true at all. Wars of religion are a mistake because, as history shows, they led to regarding religion as an instrumentum regni and to the victory of Machiavellianism and the Ragion di Stato in the 1600s. They must not be confused with the religious struggle at the level of culture, which is an entirely ­different thing.

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necessary fracture of Marxism that I discussed. Therefore, it does not seem to me that technical progress is linked in itself to the eclipse of the sacred but, rather, that this link gets necessarily established within the affluent society. The fifth essay, which aims at achieving a definition of atheism by considering the historical forms in which it presented itself, is a communication at the 16th Conference of the Center for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate, in September 1961, which was devoted to Il problema dell’ateismo. Subsequently it was read and discussed at the Piedmontese Society of Philosophy on 27 February 1962. Regarding the sixth essay, I contracted in 134 pages a work of more than one thousand pages, of which over six hundred have already been published in various works that I cite here, and which is the content of three volumes to be published in the near future. Such contraction, which was inevitable, certainly could not lead to a model of clarity, although I think I have provided, in very concise form, all the elements to justify my thesis. I ask the reader to please keep in mind from the start page 343, in which I formulate the idea that there is a continuity from Descartes to Pascal to Malebranche. And also the general thesis: modern philosophical historiography, since its beginning and then in its first great systematizer, Hegel, has traditionally relied on the interpretation of the thought of the 1600s developed by Leibniz, rejecting as “fantastic” the interpretation that certainly is not clearly manifested and yet is present in Vico’s work. Moreover, it interpreted Vico himself within this general framework. Now, the results in Cartesian historiography from 1930 onwards seem to me to lead, instead, to the conclusion that Vico alone was really able to understand, albeit through an extremely convoluted process, the spiritual process of the 1600s, and that only in connection with this point can we evaluate and make fully consistent the recent literature on Descartes and, in a complementary fashion, come to define in precise terms the place of Vico in the history of philosophy. But, then, how can we explain Vico’s anti-Cartesian critique? In actuality, it is an opposition within a continuity: the adversary is the same, the pre-Enlightenment of the libertinage érudit, irreligion that develops starting from history. Except that Vico faces a new adversary: the thinker who had breached the Cartesian dike against irreligion, Bayle. Vico’s thought process can be described as the discovery that the same exigency that led him to criticize Cartesianism as a philosophy inadequate to human formation can and must continue in a critique

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of Bayle. In other words, what Vico criticized in Cartesianism was the non-problematized encompassing context within which it formed, the separation between spiritual life and history. From this follows the necessary form that a new book on Vico must take, that of a parallel between his thought and Bayle’s. I have taken as a reference point the vision of the history of modern philosophy proposed by Goldmann, both because his interpretation of Marxism, which develops to the ultimate consequences the thesis of the first Lukàcs, is essentially identical to the one I had advanced in 1946, and also because I think that his historical perspective represents, among those proposed by Marxism thus far, the most consistent with a critical form of Marxism (to speak my mind, it represents the only one, no matter what corrections may be made to it from a strictly historicalphilological standpoint). Of course, I know very well that Goldmann cannot claim, on the Marxist side, any authority whatsoever; but I already explained that today serious Marxist works of philosophy can only be written by non-orthodox thinkers, regardless of what their practical relationship with the party may be. Besides, just as Goldmann had been led by his Marxist studies to the study of Pascal and to the quest to define the “significant structure” that makes it possible to understand his work, I, too, had been led by my Marxist studies back to Descartes and to the quest to define what at that time I called “non problematized encompassing context,” which makes it possible to understand the operations not only of Descartes’s thought but also of the thought of all those who can be called, in a rigorous sense, Cartesian.159 It is starting from this encompassing context that my critique of Goldmann’s thesis unfolds. So that, when I was discussing his perspective, I had the impression of holding a dialogue with myself.160 159 See “Cartesio e la politica.” 160 To see the closeness, which came to be without the least mutual influence, between my interpretation of Marxism and Goldmann’s, one can set side by side my 1946 essay and the one Goldmann wrote in 1947 titled “Le matérialisme dialectique est-il une philosophie?” (in Recherches dialectiques, 13ff). I will also point out that in the piece “Cartesio e la politica” I posed to myself precisely the question about the context in which the idea of philosophy as closed conceptual discourse, which does not surpass itself either by transitioning into theological thought or by transitioning into revolutionary thought, is born. This is the question about the origin of the modern figure, which was born in Descartes and continued until Hegel, of the philosopher as the “man of self-awareness.” The study by Löwith “La conclusione della filosofia

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We saw already that the Marxist ethical-political option presupposes a vision of the history of philosophy; now Goldmann’s work shows that the Marxist history of philosophy must regard the Pascal problem as the essential problem and, on the other side, is obliged to ignore the new Cartesian critical literature, because it has been a consequence of the religious philosophy of existence and of the subsequent rediscovery of Ontologism, and must conclude in the problem of whether Cartesian thought, in its core claim, has been surpassed by classical German philosophy. This incapacity on Marxism’s part confirms the fact that, while in Kierkegaard one cannot find a way to go beyond Marx, on the other hand Marxism must simply exclude both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche from the history of philosophy.161 The last essay presents in schematic form a group of theses on the nature of liberalism, which I proposed in various writings and in ­particular in two communications: “Libertà del volere e libertà etico-­ politica” [Freedom of the will and ethico-political freedom] and “Concezione perfettistica a concezione cristiana del potere politico” [The perfectist conception and the Christian conception of political power] at the seventeenth and eighteenth conferences of the Center for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate.

classica con Hegel e la sua dissoluzione in Marx e Kierkegaard” – in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 3 nos. 4–5 (1935): 343–71 (see 370) – contributed very much to drawing my attention to this topic – that is, to use his words, to the beginning of the figure of the philosopher who “entrusts the ‘exterior’ part of his existence to the exterior [social] order.” For a perfect understanding of the meaning of my essay regarding the true sense of Vico’s anti-Cartesianism, see A. Corsano, Giambattista Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1955), 62. 161 It is important to observe that Lukàcs, in tight correlation with this exclusion, repeats with regard to Descartes, Vico, and so on the traditional judgments in their most worn-out form, viewing any attempt at revising them as a manoeuvre, as usual, of “bourgeois irrationalism” (see The Destruction of Reason, passim).

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II

Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism as a Political Reality (1946) 1. THE METHODOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION Let us try and enucleate the philosophical problems that are implicit in the essential question of contemporary politics: whether it is possible to want Communism on the basis of the mere historical consideration of the possibility, today, of a community – where the idea of community, understood in its rigorous sense, implies that each individual be able to experience himself in it as a subject (i.e., it implies that alienation, Entfremdung, and reification, Verdinglichung, come to an end). So that its only ethical premise reduces to the generically Christian one of the equal dignity of every human person and is thus compatible with the most diverse philosophies. Or whether, instead, Marxism as a philosophy is, with respect to political Marxism, the transcendental condition for its possibility. With the further question, of course, whether this philosophy of Marx is an insufficiently critical and crude form of thought, suitable to serve as ideology for a “rebellion of the masses,” or whether, instead, the spiritual significance of these years is a renewed relevance of Marx’s philosophy, just as the decade 1930–40 had been marked by the comeback of his nineteenthcentury opposite, Kierkegaard. Philosophically considered, the question takes the following form: whether the process of development of Marxism (which can be observed in Marx’s own work) is directed towards becoming aware of its character of being a political science, a science that will stand only on the experimental confirmation of its predictions and not by virtue of a philosophical foundation of which it has no need. Or whether, instead, from a

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Marxist standpoint the meaningful distinction is between philosophy directed at “understanding” and philosophy directed at “changing” – whether all of Marxism lies in the substitution of the conception of philosophy as comprehension with a conception that I would like to call, and I will elucidate upon this later on, of philosophy as revolution.1 Whether, as a consequence, we must say not that Marx abandoned philosophy in favour of politics but, rather, that he became political precisely because his philosophy demanded it; and that Capital does not represent, as is commonly thought, the mature Marx, with respect to which the youthful philosophical works must be regarded as preparation and sketches; but that we must turn our attention to these works as a precondition for a truly Marxist reading of Capital, for a reading that is not, to be blunt, a “reform” of Marx to fit the doctrinal presuppositions of his critic. The first route is followed by the interpretation that is variously ­designated as “methodological” or “experimental” or “realistic” or, also, with a more explicit political reference, as “European” or “progressive.” It is widespread in the most diverse cultural milieux, ranging from Communist Catholics to a certain kind of existentialism, and is presented as the truly critical interpretation, adequate to the new problems that Communism must face in the West, able to guarantee that intellectuals can assent to the Communist idea without qualms of conscience.2 Let us nail down its essential features.

1 [Clearly when I used these terms I did not mean at all to say that Marxism boils down to pure practical action, unguided by thought, but only that Marx’s philosophy cannot be interpreted as a closed conceptual discourse.] 2 The most comprehensive book that develops this interpretation may still be that by Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (London: Gollancz, 1933). See also the extremely clear and careful chapter that Felice Balbo has devoted to “Metafisicismo del materialismo dialettico,” in Laboratorio dell’uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1946). In a certain sense this interpretation could also be described as a neo-positivist rethinking of Marxism in the sense that the new methodological positivism provides the criteria that make it possible. See how Ludovico Geymonat characterizes this trend of thought: “The great conquest of modern rationalism lies all here: in not forcing reality, in not being afraid of multiplicity, in eschewing as a matter of principle all unfounded and forced unifications” – Studi per un nuovo razionalismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1945), 340. This makes clear the possible relationship between the methodological interpretation and neo-positivism. Supposedly, the error of the theoreticians of

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While it rejects the metaphysicalist interpretation – that is, the one that says that political Marxism is the practical consequence of a systematic theory of reality that starts from self-evident first principles regarding the nature of being – at the same time it rejects revisionism in all its forms. Revisionism arose not as a critique of “metaphysicalism as an interpretation” but, rather, as a critique of “Marxism reduced to this metaphysicalist image”; thus, not as a restoration of Marxism to its true meaning but as a critique of Marxism reduced to a formula. The flaw of revisionism is that it completely misses the meaning of Marx’s spiritual experience by losing its central point, the critique of ideologism – if Marx broke with the Hegelian left and with Feuerbach it was precisely because he regarded ideological denunciation as insufficient to move history forward.3 Conversely, revisionism operates entirely at the level of ideologism, seeking the point of agreement between Marxism and one’s own culture. From this we can also understand the necessary, paradoxical destiny of this current. Without a doubt, it arose with the intention of saving Marx’s politics and economics from the ruin of his metaphysics. In fact, at the practical level it ended up with a meaning close to that of reaction. In this decadence there is a logic: having lost the central point of Marxism, it was bound also to lose touch with the needs and problems of the concrete development of the proletariat, either by forgetting the revolutionary goal in favour of individual reforms destined in the final analysis to strengthen the existing order or by becoming obsessed with the revolution to the point of disparaging the separate stages and the compromises of the preparation. But then, in order to go past preaching and attain reality, it confused the

dialectical materialism was that they were not able to free themselves form the nineteenth-­century illusion of a unitary construction that must provide the “metaphysical foundation” for practical activity. The frequent comparisons between Marxism and American pragmatism, above all with Dewey, also move in this direction (see the multiple articles by Giulio Preti in Politecnico). Still, regarding the abyss that, despite everything, separates Dewey’s thought from Marxism, see the rigorous elucidation by Galvano Della Volpe in La libertà comunista (Messina: Ferrara, 1946), 185–93. 3 It is undeniable that Marx’s critique keeps hitting this point, from the youthful dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus to the German Ideology. However, it is a matter of grasping its precise meaning. And inferring without qualifications that, in the young Marx, the philosophical interest is subordinate to the political interest is an arbitrary affirmation.

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revolutionary mindset with an activist spirit of innovation and limited its truly effective action to the critique of the metaphysicalist interpretation of Marxism, thus becoming hard to distinguish from the reactionary critique. It limited its action, that is, to the critique (to define it rigorously) that, fighting Marxism as a “total conception of life,” creates an appearance of understanding and of moving forward by claiming to preserve Marxism’s appeal to “social justice” or its emphasis on “the importance of the question of work with respect to that of freedom.” While, in practice, it uses the apparent “conception of life” to fight in actual Marxism the effort to realize this better ethical dimension – since the ethical aspiration it preserves boils down to ethics distinct from politics (to what would be desirable, to moral velleity), only to decay, by its velleitous nature, to a mask for what is in effect a reactionary intention. Together with revisionism, the methodological interpretation also abandons the various figures of speech that it produces: the distinction between the “healthy part” and the “unhealthy part” of Marx’s thought, the search for the better Marx (the humanist, the moralist, and the like) – in short, “neo-Marxism,” the “decomposition” people used to talk about in order to then include his best element in a new edifice of thought. The methodological interpretation, instead, wants to save all of Marx, but considered “under the category of political science.” And it expresses its opposition not in terms of new Marxism against old Marxism but in term of the resistance of living Marxism to the principles of death, which in the past meant orthodoxism à la Kautsky, or the revisionist antithesis, and today may mean the metaphysicalism of dialectical materialism, the false extension of Marxism via its pseudo-­ elevation to a “conception of the world.” Viewed under the category of political science, the substance of Marxism is to be found in a realistic method of social action, in a theory of revolution. However, unlike myth, which is unverifiable by essence (in fact, in reference to myth the question of future confirmation in reality is meaningless: its significance stops at being a “means to act on the present”), Marxism has its own objective truth within the limits of political science: in the manner of scientific propositions, it is verified by its result.4 4 Supposedly, the concept of political science – I cannot linger now on the attempts to formulate it exactly – severs the last possible tie between methodologism and revisionism. Apart from it, the methodological interpretation could well appear to be a development of the theses that had already been advanced in Croce’s Materialismo

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Evidently, the immediate question is: Does the methodological interpretation correspond to Marx’s intention? And if it does not correspond, how can anybody deny that it is a new form of revisionism, even though in the “search for the best Marx” it replaces the metaphor of distinguishing different parts with that of transvaluating. Moreover, speaking of non-correspondence, not to scholastic Marxism but to Marxism as it acted in history: Is not its primary presupposition, in Marx as well as in Lenin, that radical atheism must replace the “conservatism” implicit in the Idealist sublation of religion into philosophy? In Lenin’s so famous and so often quoted sentence “the fundamental premise of materialism is the recognition of the external world, of the existence of things outside and independent of our mind,”5 one must see neither the gnoseologic form of Communist barbarianism nor a stance that is valid against Idealism but is guilty of confusing realism with materialism (forgetting the existence of realist positions that are not materialist at all); nor the endorsement of an action-oriented realism against solipsistic gnoseologism (or at least gnoseologism that relegates within theory the viewpoint

storico [Materialismo storico ed economia Marxistica (Bari: Laterza, 1921)]. [We could wonder whether, and to what extent, the problem of rejecting the methodological interpretation that had been made possible by his earlier position mattered to the late Croce.] But the proponents of the new interpretation – or the proponents at least of its novelty – point out that, in Croce, such development was blocked by the adversary he intended to fight. Croce’s interpretation, which had risen as a reaction to the deformation of Marxism into a sociology of the naturalistic type and having in mind only such a deformation, lost the specifically Marxist sense of being a political science and consistently reduced historical materialism to a canon of historical interpretation, to a method of knowing and not of making history. The tight kinship, apart from a very hazy concept like that of political science, between the revisionist commentaries and those of the methodological interpretation is a confirmation of what I will say later, that it is not possible to draw an essential distinction between revisionism and the methodological interpretation. I should also remark that the interpretation of Marx’s philosophical thought, which I will discuss, as the only possible one in the context of the methodological thesis, was already outlined in the essay by Croce, “I ‘neo’ in filosofia,” in Discorsi di varia filosofia, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1945). 5 [TN] V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 83.

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of truth),6 but, rather, the expression of this fundamental thesis in the language of dialectical materialism. We shall see later that this objection is, in my judgment, essentially insurmountable. But now I will try to outline, in its necessary features, what could be an attempt at a rigorous response within the framework of the methodological interpretation. If Marxism is considered under the category of political science, it is clear that its critique of the “mendacity of lofty ideas” – religion, idealism, morality, and so on – can no longer be interpreted as a challenge to ideas in their ontological truth value but only in their possibility of being used as “mystification” – the word dear to Marx in his first work of great importance, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – of a historical situation. The sociological confusion that Marxism has brought to light is that of transferring the same absoluteness that belongs to ideal principles to a determined historical order (of using this absoluteness in order to absolutize the empirical). Making a determined historical order absolute turns naturally into making the ideal principles (which are invoked as its “foundation”) relative to it. What does Marxism’s best teaching boil down to, then? To having taken a stand for the essential realism of practical activity. To having shown that history is made by men “of flesh and blood,” who have needs and passions, and not by ideas – or by men but men regarded as mere “carriers of ideas.” To having shown that surpassing a historical situation is not the simple, so to speak automatic (or in any case “easy”), transcription of an ideal dialectic but that ideas enter history as “forces” at men’s disposal. To having revealed the characteristic ambivalence – we also could develop Marx’s thought thus (a bit loosely, I will grant you, but without contradicting it) – whereby the same idea can be used to theologize the given order or, instead, to show its inadequacy. The judgment whether or not the social order matches the idea is not

6 The Marxist confusion of realism and materialism is a theme that has often been emphasized by Berdaev and that is being emphasized today by Georges Izard, the recent theoretician of French revisionist socialism. On the value of the action-oriented realism found in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, see the remarkable piece by Geymonat, “Materialismo e problema della conoscenza,” in Rivista di Filosofia 37 nos. 3–4 (1946): 109ff. Later on I will mention briefly, and just as a suggestion for further reflection, how Marxist realism must be understood as the result of surpassing gnoseologism (surpassing Idealism as a consequence of radical atheologism).

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pronounced by man as a pure spirit or as a logical subject but by man engaged in a historically determined situation and who has, therefore, needs and passions. How the materialist myth became superimposed on this realistic and humanistic conception of history can be easily explained by a phenomenological analysis of the concept of revolution. The myth of materialism necessarily makes its appearance in the transition from the simple economic-political concept of revolution (as substantial modification of the property regime in relation to changed production conditions) to the concept of total revolution (which is its utopian projection: revolution as “the restoration of the man of nature” or “creation of a new man,” and as liberation not from this or that historical evil but from evil in general, from sin: hence, besides its anti-historical character, the revolutionary utopia’s character of being “Christianity in reverse,” as a promise of restoration or of instauration, depending on its anti-historical or pseudo-historicistic form, of a humanity freed from sin). It is, in fact, the mediating factor of this transition. It arises as a response to the conservative side’s effort to theologize the given order (an effort that defines the image of reaction); that is, when the revolutionary will cannot find its justification by referring to the system of values recognized in a given society. The conservative side’s ideology is necessarily Idealist (in a broad sense – for example, precisely in the sense in which the theoreticians of dialectical materialism regard as Idealist even Thomist realism). Under historical conditions that make necessary an economic-political revolution, the conservative side cannot hold on (i.e., it cannot try to break up the mass of the alienated class) except by trying to show that the social order it defends is mandated by a transcendent or immanent Reason. Its philosophy will be a philosophy of “justification” of reality, and so of “contemplation by Reason,” of “comprehension.” To be more precise, the thesis of the primacy of theoretical activity is not even essential to it; what is truly essential is the exhortation to a form of ascetic morality, to the sacrifice of the inferior subjectivity of needs and passions that the subject “of the Universal” must make – a sacrifice that, depending on the cultural situation, can be presented as aimed at Reason’s “comprehension” or to the fulfilment of a “universal will” or of “the ethical idea of the State” and the like. Hence the structurally necessary features (from Antisthenes, the Greek revolutionary philosopher, to dialectical materialism) of revolutionary ideology. It will be materialism and a philosophy of action within

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materialism. Materialism because one wants to show that the rationality that justifies inequality is neither divine Reason nor human reason in its universality but the rationality of that determined historical group, a historical product, in short. That is, that the given social order is a fact, has the contingency of a fact, and the rationality to which it makes appeal is not its principle and its foundation, but it is intrinsic to the fact itself, as a “superstructure.” Evidently, the contradiction between materialism and philosophy of action is what makes it possible later, once the revolution is established, to move past the substitution of philosophy with revolutionary ideology. But we can easily realize why in revolutionary thought the consideration of this contradiction is blocked. The ideological figure of the materialist philosophy of action actually expresses the transcendence of the revolutionary level with respect to the level of moralism. Materialism means that revolutionary action is not propelled by the morality of the single individual (by his freedom) but by the necessity of the historical situation. The revolutionary is such because he feels “alienated” not on account of an injustice (and thus of a contingency) committed by somebody – where this somebody may well be the totality of the community to which he belongs (in that case we have the romantic type of the individual “estranged from the mass”) – but because of the necessity of the existing social order (therefore one feels to be a revolutionary as a subject belonging to a given class – hence the reconciliation with the mass that is characteristic of the revolutionary spirit, its “nonromanticism”). Therefore, the hurdle is no longer found within us, as in the moralistic attitude, but outside us; that is, one does not elevate oneself to the revolutionary point of view but, at most, can evade it. It is easy to understand that, from this negative consideration of freedom as a possibility of evasion, one must move to a philosophy of necessity and to a materialistic interpretation of the possibility of evasion itself (just think how the path to the negation of freedom always depends on its previous moral devaluation, on regarding it as the mere possibility of going astray). Of course, no other value can be attributed to revolutionary materialism than that of being an ideology. In other words, it is not an answer to the problem of being but a political position vis-à-vis a contingent use of Idealism (broadly understood) to theologize historical reality. Philosophy decays into ideology by excluding from its consideration some part of the real or of the possible (the end of history, the exclusion of the future in some forms of Idealism; revolutionary materialism, with

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its exclusion of the past, is just the mirror image of this). Ideology is such in as much as it thinks “against” – that is, it serves the purpose of setting one part of reality in opposition to another. In this sense it is “practical” thought (it enters the historical process as an instrument for action). This is also why its value is historically conditioned; it can decay from an instrument that in a determined historical and cultural situation is useful with regard to promoting revolutionary action to an instrument of asphyxia. It can backfire as the instrument that reactionaries use to isolate the proletarian party – is not the most serious antiCommunist criticism today the one that focuses on the Soviet regime’s character as an “atheistic theocracy” and on its consequent totalitarianism? This is what a Communist regime must necessarily look like if it wants to present itself as bearing the “only true philosophy.” The materialistic-revolutionary ideology cannot succeed because of the link with utopia that I mentioned, except in situations in which historical awareness is lacking. Therefore, in the West the marriage of dialectical materialism and Communist politics is at risk of turning into a break between Communism and culture, and into making Communism relative to Russia, a “non-European country.” Now, how should one assess the presence in Marx of this revolutionary materialism? Should we think of it as an essential element of Marxism or as an accidental and eliminable representation? As you know this question has been picked up again recently, and thinking that it is essential has led to the idea of surpassing Marxism to transition into liberal socialism. According to the methodological interpretation, on the contrary, not only can this metaphysical foundation be removed without taking anything away from Marxism, but this elimination is required by Marxism’ s deep intention. Therefore, we must look at the backdrop of problems against which Marx’s thought arose and reflect upon the conviction shared by all the thinkers of the dissolution of Hegelianism: that Hegel’s philosophy was “philosophy.” And this philosophy concluded with the justification of the present, the identity of rational and real led to the apology of the Prussian state. Philosophy as the “owl of Minerva” and the polemic against the abstract Sollen and the ideology of the Enlightenment ended up meaning, in practice, the absorption of philosophy into the established order. Hence the terms of the question faced by the “young Hegelians,” which in fact is not a philosophical but rather a practical question: asking “philosophy” to authorize their revolutionary aspiration. It is a practical question because it is not

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an internal critique of the principle of Hegelian philosophy but a polemic against a particular practical attitude that seemed to be legitimated by it, and an attempt to bend it into the program and the justification for the opposite practical attitude. An inversion was necessarily the only form that this attempt could take, precisely because of the absence of an effective theoretical critique. Hegel’s conclusion of history was not eliminated but projected into the future, with the result that it changed Hegelianism into an apocalyptic and messianic conception. Hegelian dialectic was not reformed but transcribed materialistically. Historically, Marx’s thought articulated itself against this background, which goes to explain his language but not what he really thought (in short, it explains only the contingent form that Marxism took in relation to a given cultural environment). His actual question, which is the source of his criticisms of the Hegelian left and of Feuerbach, is the transition from the revolutionary aspiration to revolutionary action. In him, the political, and not philosophical, character of the question of the Hegelian left comes to awareness (“it is not a matter of understanding the world, but of changing it”). However, it is clear that, because of this mere transition from the activity of the philosopher to that of the politician and the revolutionary, without a previous internal critique of Hegelianism, the background had to be reduced more and more to a marginal role and overshadowed, but it could not be entirely suppressed. This would have required a radical criticism or an extension of Hegelianism; Marx’s materialism was a sort of non-philosophical surrogate of this criticism or extension, and he was satisfied with it precisely because of the political and not philosophical character of his question. In short, his materialism essentially meant: my revolutionary activity can only be justified by a philosophical stance that in relation to orthodox Hegelianism must be judged to be materialism – hence the strange impression of being a superstructure that it produces today, without the context of the dialogue with the now-gone figure of the orthodox Hegelian. But if, then, it must be regarded as a historical response to a given cultural situation, removing it does not mean taking anything away from Marxism but, rather, refraining from theologizing one of its historical ways of presenting itself (i.e., it means being truly Marxist). Metaphysicalist Marxism is founded not on the positive aspect but, rather, on the historical limitation of Marx’s questions, on the missing answer to a question he did not ask (whether the perspective that viewed Hegelianism as “philosophy” tout court was susceptible to criticism).

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We saw earlier the link between the materialist myth and the revolutionary spirit; certainly this link is not absolutely necessary, but still it gets established extremely easily in history because of the very ease with which spiritualistic philosophies decay – in indefinite, unpredictable, and often unaware forms – into conservative ideologies. This helps explain why it endures, and why Communist politicians are reluctant to abandon it. The identification of revisionism and reactionary criticism, and the Russian cultural situation, explains why a more rigid materialism accompanied the “return to Marx” by the anti-revisionist Lenin. But clearly the historical efficacy of an ideology can only last as long as it can be mistaken for a philosophy. Its exhaustion has a particular structure: it does not merely cease, but it backfires, it becomes an instrument of the opposite side (I cannot now linger on the reason for this phenomenon, which is a consequence of the essence of ideology). This is what is happening today in the West. Just think: by hardening Marxism into a total conception of life, the metaphysicalist closure creates the necessity of choosing between Communism and anti-Communism. During the period of the Resistance people seemed to surpass this choice in practice, after coming under the impression that renouncing anti-Communism was required not just as a simple, contingent, factual condition but as a necessary ideal condition for the transition from anti-Fascism as a moral position to anti-Fascism as a political position.7 But this surpassing was practically lived rather than theoretically justified, which explains why, after the Resistance’s end, the choice presented itself again, and the intellectuals’ sympathies for Communism declined. Thus, it seems that the methodological interpretation is required for the sake of the vitality of political Communism itself.8 *** We must ask ourselves (and this seems to me the best way to reach a  rigorous critical evaluation of it) whether the methodological

7 Regarding this interpretation of the Resistance, with which I disagree, see the very interesting book by L. Lombardo-Radice, Fascismo e anticomunismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1946). 8 [TN] This concludes Del Noce’s long exposition of the arguments of the advocates of the methodological interpretation, which started on page 174. From now on Del Noce speaks again in his own voice.

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interpretation applies to Engels’s spiritual process – which is indeed the quest for an ontological justification of Marxist praxis in an attempt to save the integrality of Marxism without having adequately penetrated its philosophical origin – rather than to the process by which Marx arrived at his Communism. In other words, whether this interpretation’s argument is valid against Engelism – which is a quest to found the validity of political Marxism on a “conception of the world” – but is not valid with respect to Marxism, which is, instead, an anthropology and presents itself, with regard to political praxis, not as a foundation but as a transcendental condition. We know that Engels did not arrive at Communism through a philosophical experience but through a study of the evolution of capitalism in an economic-political sense. His two articles in the French-German Annals (“The Condition of England” and “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”),9 which established the union everybody knows between him and Marx, must have appeared to Marx to be the confirmation of his theoretical construction by historical reality.10 Through Engels, Marx discovered the link joining his philosophy to concrete politics; this is probably the meaning and the foundation of their friendship. But the fact that Engels did not go through the same philosophical experience as Marx, and learned it in its already conceptualized form, has the effect that the philosophical question presents itself to him precisely in the terms that the methodological interpretation also attributes to Marx: as a quest for the “legitimization” – for permission,

 9 [TN] Friedrich Engels, “Die Lage Englands” and “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” in Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (1844). 10 Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx. L’uomo e l’opera. Dall’Hegelismo al materialismo storico, 1818–1845 (Milan: La Nuova Biblioteca, 1946), 277. The Marx-Engels relationship is very hard to express in precise terms because of the novelty of Marx’s philosophical position. Whereas the thesis (affirmed by the followers of dialectical materialism) that their thoughts are completely identical is not adequate, it would be even more incorrect to fall into the opposite excess and to present Engels’s position as a deviation and a distortion of that of Marx. These terms would make sense only if Marx’s philosophy were a “conception of the world”; but if the originality of Marxism, as we shall see later, is that of surpassing philosophy by transitioning into political action, then Engelism is merely a less adequate philosophical expression, a sort of symbolization of real Marxism in a naturalistic language; its inadequacy is, let us put it this way, technically philosophical, it is just the incapacity to respond to a more astute critical position.

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basically – of a political praxis by philosophy. People often say that Engels’s Marxism is heavily imbued with positivism. This characterization is essentially true, but let us try and give it a historically rigorous meaning. The developmental process of his philosophical thought can be schematically outlined as follows: 1. Engels’ concern is to preserve the integrality of Marxism. Therefore, he grasps the necessity, for critical Communism, of a philosophy. But, on the other hand, the deepest drive of Marx’s philosophy ­escapes him: Marx’s critique of “comprehension,” of philosophy as a “conception of the world.” Because of this, he is bound to confuse Marx’s critique of Hegel (which concerns the question of the ­relationship between reason and existence) with that developed by positivism (about cognitive contents that do not fall within the framework of the Hegelian system; again the realm of existence – all critiques of Hegel come from this realm – but considered as an object). 2. Therefore, he must rethink Marxism in terms of the positivist ­critique of Hegel’s philosophy of nature.11 3. But after this transposition, how to express Marx’s distinction ­between his materialism and the ancient one? And how to express the “non-philosophy,” the surpassing of philosophy also formulated by Marx? According to Marx’s actual position, as we shall see later, the ­distinction lay in the fact that his materialism was the negation of materialism understood as a Weltanshauung. Conversely, Engels finds himself forced to try and make the Marxist distinction fit within a materialism already understood beforehand as Weltanshauung. Hence the fundamental contradiction of his attempt, between materialism and dialectics. Having inserted Marxism into the naturalistic framework, what distinguishes it from vulgar evolutionism will be that it makes man an active factor and not a passive product of evolution (hence Engels’s polemic against Dühring, and his tendency to view it as ­analogue to Marx’s stance with respect Feuerbach). But why, ­according to Engels, is Marxist materialism able to preserve this role 11 Indeed, his fundamental work was supposed to be titled Dialectics of Nature. It remained unfinished, and its largely unpublished fragments were published by Riazanov in 1925.

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of human activity? Because it is a materialism that, having been born surpassing Hegelianism (and this surpassing is represented as ­dialectic, distorting completely Marx’s relation to Hegel), preserves its truth. In short, and simplifying the sequence of steps, because it is dialectical materialism, a concept that belongs entirely to Engels, whereas I believe that not even the term “historical materialism” ­appears explicitly in Marx.12 4. Together with the concept of dialectics, Engels transcribes and also distorts the Marxist surpassing of philosophy, which he understands as the absorption of philosophy into science, made possible by the appropriation by science of the dialectic method.13 5. But dialectical materialism is a conception of the world. Hence the curious fact that, in Engelism, the properly Marxist part (Marx’s ­anthropology, which is the entirety of his philosophy) becomes the “section” devoted to the theory of history and the politics of ­dialectical materialism.14 6. Dialectics is invoked, as we have seen, in order to save the activist character of Marxism. In the end its meaning becomes equivalent to that of revolution,15 and materialism becomes the condition for bringing out its revolutionary sense, the transition from thought ­dialectics to living dialectics (the mystic and conservative meaning that dialectics has in Hegel is due to its being inserted within an Idealist system).

12 This remark is made by Mondolfo in Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels (Genoa: Formiggini, 1912). 13 “Philosophy is therefore ‘sublated’ here [in real science], that is, ‘both overcome and preserved’; overcome as regards its [idealistic] form, and preserved as regards its real [dialectic] content (F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pt. 1, chap. 13) [TN: the words in brackets appear in Del Noce’s quotation in Italian but not in the English translation by Emile Burns (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947). Del Noce was known for quoting from memory]. 14 This is the source of the common opinion, which is essential both to revisionism and to its methodological interpretation, that the specific subject of Marx’s research is a theory of history that must be freed from the metaphysicalist framing. 15 Regarding this equivalence, see the book by the founder of anti-revisionist Russian Marxism, G.V. Plekhanov, Le questioni fondamentali del marxismo (Milan: I.E.I, 1945) [G.V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Moscow: International Publishers, 1962)].

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From what has been said it is clear that in Engels dialectical materialism does not arise as a philosophy but as the surrogate for a philosophy: as a way of signifying the integral preservation of the Marxist political praxis (it is easy to show that every single one of the terms used by Engels is a cover for the defence or the condemnation of a practical position). If we then consider the history of dialectical materialism, we see that it is the fulfilment of its destiny, the clarification of its nature as an ideology. Apparently, in Russia it is used to judge the orthodoxy, or not, of a given praxis. Berdaev writes: “Philosophical controversies [in Soviet Russia] are problems debated not so much from the point of view of truth or error as from the point of view of orthodoxy or heresy.”16 But let us observe that, in itself, this characteristic does not even mean that dialectical materialism is devalued. It simply says that it must not be regarded as a philosophy stricto sensu. Its nature is exactly that of a faithful transcription of Marxist materialism at the ideological level. Its task is to justify the same practical consequences as philosophical Marxism (when, later on, we shall examine the specific Marxist nexus of theory and practice, we shall also see that it would not be correct to present dialectical materialism as an alteration or as a superstructure of Marx’s philosophy; it is merely a less philosophical expression thereof, a position that, from the standpoint of a more rigorous philosophical critique, must be surpassed but that, in the meantime, is useful in order to distinguish Marxism from non-Marxism because all the positions that form the essential core of Marxism are signified in it, although in a philosophically inadequate form). It is also clear how Engelism had necessarily to originate revisionism, upon being introduced into a cultural milieu where the mix up with philosophy could not be sustained. In this regard, we must keep clear of some common opinions. It is absolutely wrong to present Engleism 16 Le fonti e lo spirito del comunismo russo (Milan: Corticelli, 1945), 182 [Nicolas Berdaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, trans. R.M. French (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 151]. Lenin’s reflections on dialectics mark the transition from theoretical equivalence between dialectics and revolution to practical equivalence. Thus, in a 1921 text about the issue of trade unions, he uses it in order to denounce the left-wing deviation by Trotsky and the right-wing deviation by Bukharin. The fact that, subsequently, a famous pamphlet by Stalin was thought to be settling questions of interpretation about dialectical materialism is the best proof and the best clarification of its ideological, and not strictly philosophical, nature.

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as the result of reading Marx from a bourgeois spiritual disposition (unless we intend the term “bourgeoisie” as a philosophical category). Engelism’s origins are philosophical and not political. Regarding its strictly theoretical form, it stems from the need to determine to what extent Marxism is truly scientific;17 in its political forms, it stems from the need to appropriate this critique to avoid a conflict between socialism and culture. In truth, rather than being intentional, downplaying the revolutionary meaning was the necessary result of the type of reading that, by mistaking Engels’s transcription for Marx’s philosophy, had to proceed consistently to devalue Marxism as a philosophy. We can observe this somehow involuntary formation of the revisionist paradigm if we try to characterize precisely the scholar in whom people usually see the beginning of the critical crisis of Marxism, Antonio Labriola. The definition he gives of the flaw of revisionist literature in a 1898 letter to Croce is unbeatable in its precision (as we shall see shortly): “You may also agree with me on this, that you argue instead of explaining, and you argue only with yourself. In other words: you argue with yourself to know to what use you should put Marxism, but not to know what it is.”18 Listen also to Croce’s comment: “In him there were two souls, the soul of the critic and philosopher who wished to organize and correct Marxism (and in this he was very close, not only to me, but also to Bernstein and the other authors of the crisis), and the soul of the revolutionary who felt and welcomed in himself Marx’s revolutionary value, and who, in this respect, should have taken his place next to the dogmatists and the conservatives or re-awakeners of Marx’s original revolutionary spirit, that is, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, who was beginning his work at that time.”19 At bottom, the appearance that there were two souls was simply the result of the conflict in him between an extremely acute sensitivity to the disfigurements of Marxism and an

17 Regarding these origins of the “crisis of Marxism,” see the truly illuminating essay by Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia” (from 1937), republished as an appendix to the new edition of Labriola’s essays La concezione materialistica della storia (Bari: Laterza, 1945). 18 Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 301. 19 Ibid., 308.

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inability to express what it truly was,20 because the significance of the philosophical problems from which Marxism had emerged escaped him. This is why, in him, the conversationalist prevails over the writer (because of the difficulty of finding the iunctura rerum);21 and this is why his sensitivity to the disfigurements of Marxism expressed itself in emotional reactions and polemical excesses, while, by virtue of its critical content, his work actually opened the revisionist crisis and found in Croce its most rigorous continuer. But now let us quickly show the derivation of the essential revisionist themes from the mix up of Marxism with Engelism. Because of the contradiction in Engels’s position, people occasionally come up with the idea of going back to Marx to find in him a better philosophical expression (in this regard the works in which Rodolfo Mondolfo tried, between 1908 and 1923, to provide a philosophical theory of critical Communism are extremely instructive). But, since they understand materialism in the sense used by Engels, they must consistently end up pinpointing the essence of Marx’s philosophical thought in a philosophy of praxis for which the term “materialism” is very ill-suited. To this interpretive position corresponds the isolation of the Theses on Feuerbach as Marx’s only philosophical text. Where that word “only” simply meant cutting them off from the philosophical problems from which they arose (with the consequence that the work of the commentator ended up taking the form, even against his deliberate intentions, of a work of abstraction to justify how the element of truth of historical materialism might be thinkable starting from his own philosophy). Certainly, the Theses lent themselves to this very well. They are the conclusion of Marx’s philosophical work from 1840 to 1845, a coming to awareness of his whole process of thought. One is fully authorized to see in them all of Marxism, condensed in a very quick synthesis. By developing them, one can find the past and future processes of Marx’s thought; together with the definition of his break with Hegel, also the Manifesto and Capital. But, taken by themselves, their aphoristic form can justify the most varied interpretations: every revisionist can find in them the questions of his own philosophy. 20 This should be the starting point for a rigorous determination of the meaning of his work, putting an end to a hyper-valuation that by now has lasted half a century and that, historically, is understandable but today has become conventional. 21 Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 273.

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But, in the end, out of this philosophy of praxis one could only get the thesis of humanistic Marxism: a vague thesis that limits itself to showing that Marxism is neither economic determinism nor mechanic nor dialectic fatalism, the purpose being to avoid getting it involved in the crisis of evolutionist positivism. In short, it limits itself to indicating what Marxism is not rather than its positive content (as a rule, this deficiency was remedied by replacing Marx’s man with the man of secularized Christianity). This is natural, after all. Isolated from its problems, the philosophy of Marx was interrogated as a philosophy of comprehension. And then its devaluation became inevitable: one could point out that Marx did not directly tackle philosophy’s classic and eternal questions, the question of God, of immortality, and so on; or that he did not show any interest in theorizing about the spiritual forms that seem extraneous to political activity – namely, art and science; that he limited himself to considering and mythologizing as eternal a contingent historical nexus of religion and conservative politics of the nineteenth century; that his pretended philosophy lacks not only a systematic character but also the quest to organize ideas into an overall vision of reality; finally, that the complete subordination of philosophical interest to political interest (of the will to interpret to the will to change) is declared precisely in the last thesis on Feuerbach. By rigorously following this road, one must arrive at the perspective of the not only unsurpassed but unsurpassable revisionist commentary (as a precise definition of the categories under which every revisionist reading is possible): Croce’s Materialismo storico. One must arrive at the conviction that Capital shows us the true and mature Marx, who supposedly recognized his vocation as politician and economist and not as philosopher. With respect to it, the writings of the period between 1840 and 1848 represent Marx still unaware of himself; they signify the slow surfacing of the true Marx from his pre-culture, from what he passively received from the cultural milieu, which remains in the works of the mature period as a burden or as mere phraseology – the second-rate philosophy of the Hegelian left, a generic term in which people often muddle together thoughts as different as those of the Hegelian left in the proper sense, of Feuerbach, and of Marx as philosopher. Of course, the conviction that the true Marx is Marx freed from the bad framework of the questions associated with the dissolution of Hegelianism had to turn into the view that is criticized in Antonio Labriola’s judgment, which I quoted earlier: Marx’s effective thought is a thought dissociated from his questions, which answers, instead, the

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questions of his critics. Hence the precise sense taken by the image, which is common to the entire revisionist literature, of the “two faces” of Marx: the element that can be assimilated and the one that cannot be assimilated by a European culture that constituted itself independently of Marxism. By reflecting on this sense we understand the indefinite variety of ways in which it has been possible to present these two faces, albeit along the common line of reconciling Marx with traditional ethics – and it is also worth making a remark about the typical character of this reconciliation: it is not presented as a “synthesis”; it is, rather, an observation that Marx “is not contradictory to” or “recalls as a necessary premise.” And, speaking of recalling a particular philosophical position other than Marxism, it is a necessity in order to make possible the assumption of Marxism into the cultural perspective of the interpreter. Thus, for young Croce the recalling will be of Machiavelli and the best traditions of Italian political science; Bernstein will view Marxism as an extension of liberalism; Adler and Vorländer will find in it the political specification of Kantianism; Berdaev will speak of a personalist Marx in contrast to a Hegelian Marx; and, recently, Calogero has presented a version of Marx who ontologizes the initially ethical meaning of the equation value-labour, obeying the suggestions of theologizing historicism. Furthermore: we have seen that Engels’s foundation of Marxist politics did not have the meaning of a transcendental condition but, rather, of inserting it into a system as one part of a whole. Then, it is natural to point out that, from the equation value-work, and in general from the materialistic theory of history, one cannot derive any practical attitude (or at most, only a form of political quietism). Therefore, of necessity theoretical Marxism and practical socialism have to be evaluated separately; and when the former is considered, one is forced to recognize in historical materialism a hybrid confusion of vulgar materialism and historicism (and this is indeed what it must look like if it is disconnected from Marx’s specific philosophy). Having disassembled historical materialism into its terms, one consistently reaches the conclusion that their union is artificial and contradictory. Having rejected it as a philosophy, the good part to be extracted from it theoretically will be an empirical canon of interpretation, nothing more than a recommendation to historians to pay attention to economic activity in the life of peoples.22

22 Ibid., 292.

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But then, the foundation of Marxist socialism, too, as a practical attitude, must be that of every other possible socialism – namely, an ethical presupposition. It will be implicit, but in fact quite easy to illuminate because, once Marx’s philosophy is set aside, it becomes necessary to make recourse to an unspoken iusnaturalism in order to explain the critique of surplus value – indeed, how could one think of explaining the passage from the Ricardian to the Marxist sense of the equation value-labour if not through a critique of the reduction of labour to a commodity, based on the affirmation of man’s right to his own free activity?23 Hence the incorrect judgment that the distinction between utopian socialism and Marxist socialism lies in the addition in the latter of a realistic character – which is then variously called Machiavellian realism, or the realism of romantic politics, or the realism of political science – to the iusnaturalistic presupposition.24 These are contradictory elements, two souls of Marxism that make it ineffective in practice, or, better, limit its effectiveness to countries like Russia, where the absence of the iusnaturalistic tradition permits the reduction of the iusnaturalistic aspect to a myth (by projecting the respect for the person to the ideal of a future society). In fact, this contradiction is intrinsic to revisionist Marxism, within whose horizon one must necessarily face the question of ends versus means, the question of Machiavellianism and its insoluble antinomy.25 It is also in connection with the failure to solve this problem that we must explain why revisionist socialism has been less effective than old orthodoxism à la Kautsky, in which the expression “scientific socialism” ended up meaning “socialism whose advent is guaranteed by science,” or the absorption of Marxism within

23 The most rigorous expression of this iusnaturalistic interpretation of surplus value is perhaps that offered by Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico, 335ff. 24 On this perspective, which is also essentially Croce’s view in the well-known work Per la storia del comunismo in quanto realtà politica (Bari: Laterza, 1943), see the recent essay by Antoni, “Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nella dottrina di Marx,” in the volume Considerazioni su Hegel e Marx (Naples: Ricciardi, 1946). 25 There is no point in reviewing the vast recent literature on the question of ends versus means (including Berdaev, de Rougemont, Huxley, and also Köstler’s novels). This literature is, in fact, very important in order to show the impossibility of reconciling Communist political praxis with any anthropology that is, in a broad sense, Christian. Regarding the travails of revisionist socialism pertaining to the question of violence, see, for instance, R. Mondolfo, Sulle orme di Marx, 3rd ed. (Bologna: Cappelli, 1923).

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evolutionist scientism. The revisionist critique against the fatalism of this position may make sense at an abstract ideological level. However, as a matter of fact scientism allowed one to avoid asking the question of means: if the inevitable advent of socialism is proved by science, and if, on the other hand, its establishment requires that a people be mature for it, the criterion to judge this maturity can only be sought empirically in the degree of diffusion of the conviction that socialism is true – that is, in practice, in the majoritarian criterion (which is Kautsky’s position in his well-known pamphlet on the dictatorship of the proletariat). *** If the origin and nature of revisionism are as I described them – and I believe my argument is hard to counter – establishing an essential difference between revisionism and the methodological interpretation turns out to be impossible. The structural elements are the same: the same initial confusion between Marx’s philosophy and Engelism, the same invocation of a philosophy other than Marxism – this time, neopositivist rationalism – to serve the same function (which is not determining a precise philosophy of critical Communism but allowing its assumption within the spiritual horizon of the interpreter). As for the reason given to distinguish the two positions, it is the same that propels the dialectic of the political forms that have come out of revisionism: forgetting the revolutionary substance of Marxism in order to shift the question onto the ideological level, with the conviction that it will translate automatically into historical advancement; and emphasizing the agreement with the principles of liberal civilization, an emphasis whose fault is to forget that the Marxism polemic is not against those principles in themselves but against their bourgeois mystification, so that the agreement it emphasizes is at risk of turning into the bourgeois mystification of socialism – but was not that the reproach by Sorel’s left-wing socialism against Bernstein’s right-wing revisionism? Or, to remain in Italy, was that not the reproach by Rosselli’s liberal socialism (which formed in the atmosphere of De Man’s “surpassing of Marxism”) against the revisionism theorized by Mondolfo?26

26 V. Rosselli, Socialismo liberale (Florence: Edizioni U, 1945), 60.

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Actually, the distinction is not at the structural level but at the historical level. Methodologism faces the success, or the appearance of success, of the socialist form that invokes dialectical materialism and the practical failure of the forms that came out of revisionism. Therefore, it is no longer a matter of opposing crude and non-European Communism with forms of socialism reconciled with culture, values, freedom, and the like but, rather, of demonstrating that political Communism can effectively be reconciled with culture.27 However, it is also clear that in another respect the new interpretation is in a situation of inferiority with respect to revisionism. By hiding the ends-versus-means question behind the realism of political science, it dodges the question that, rigorously analyzed to its core, makes it possible to dissipate the appearance of two souls in Marxism and the notion that Marx was “as acute as a sociologist as he was weak as an anthropologist,” and to grasp the essence of Marxism as the first consistent nonChristian anthropology. However, to do so one must leave behind the revisionist devaluation of Marx’s philosophy; from whose perspective, the consideration of the non-Christian aspect of Marxism can only lead to a moralistic critique. In another sense, we must also speak of the inferiority of the methodological interpretation with respect to dialectical materialism itself. As weak as this position may appear to a strictly philosophical consideration, nonetheless it manifests the valid exigency that one cannot enter into political Marxism without a precise philosophy, without a new idea of man.28

2. MARX’S NON-PHILOSOPHY The question we now have to pose to ourselves is whether all of Marxism does not constitute itself in the transition from a concept of philosophy

27 [That is, old revisionism (à la Bernstein, à la Vorländer) set aside the revolutionary themes of Marxism in order to harmonize it with the values of liberal society; whereas new revisionism intended, and still intends today, to broaden liberalism in order to be able to reconcile it with a revolution that it would like to justify on the basis of liberal (or Christian) values.] 28 [At that time by the formula dialectical materialism I meant to refer, using somewhat imprecise terminology, to the presentation of Marxist philosophy as a closed conceptual discourse; to the scholasticism of the Stalinist period, if you wish].

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as comprehension to a concept of philosophy as revolution (or, in surpassing the type of the philosopher by the type of the revolutionary; in the transition from philosophy to a non-philosophy, which, however, is not mere practical activity distinct from theoretical activity but rises and explicates itself as a surpassing of philosophy). If Marx’s position is defined thus, the distinction between him and Engels can be specified more rigorously than I did earlier: Engels’s philosophy, just like the subsequent dialectical materialism, is instead a “philosophy of revolution,” a justification of revolution through the inversion of dialectics – that is, it is still an inversion within philosophy (consider also the way in which Engels presents the relationship between Marx and Feuerbach; Feuerbach lacks dialectics, but the real relationship is more complex) and not an inversion of philosophy. In order to grasp this point, namely, the strictly philosophical and not merely moral motivation for his transition to politics, it will be helpful to outline schematically – abstracting initially from the practical tendency – the essential stages of his philosophical thought, starting from an analysis of his relationship with Hegel.29 1. Engels’ judgment that Marx started from the contradiction between the revolutionary method and Hegel’s conservative system is ­essentially correct, but it is important to make it precise. Marx agrees with Hegel on the fundamental proposition of his thought, “reconciliation with reality,” in its theoretical as well as in its historical-­ cultural meaning (surpassing Romanticism), but he wonders whether understanding such reconciliation in the form of “­comprehension” is contradictory. In its theoretical meaning, Hegel’s ­proposition is the result of the critique of all theologizations of the finite (hence his critique of separate infinity, made finite in its opposition to the finite; this critique is the condition to achieve the reconciliation with reality, to turn Hegelianism into a worldly philosophy). But, now, what is the reason for Hegelian philosophy’s

29 The critical literature on Marx’s authentic philosophical position is very scarce. The work by Della Volpe I cited earlier is very important; so is, of course, apart from various critical reservations that I cannot explain now, the book by Karl Löwith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche (Zurich-New York: Europa Verlag, 1941) [TN: From Hegel to Nietzsche (London: Constable and Co., 1965)], which was perhaps the first to bring Marx’s thought back to its original philosophical questions. The book by Cornu that I just mentioned is also very important, even though it has a mainly descriptive character.

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character of finished totality, for the “conclusion of philosophy” – or its theologization as philosophy – and its consequences ending in the conservatism of the Philosophy of Right? In Marx’s view, the Hegelian conclusion of philosophy and history is a consequence of the permanence in Hegel of the “image” of Idealism – namely, reconciliation sought in the humanization of the divine, with the ­consequent image of man as “self-consciousness” – or of the ­preservation of “modern Christianity,” which is implicit in the ­dialectical surpassing of religion by philosophy. Together with the “Spirit” one necessarily introduces the in te ipsum redi and its ­consequence: asceticism of knowledge, meaning that the finite ­subject in order to “comprehend” must “elevate” himself to such a degree of universality that his own existence or not within finite ­reality becomes indifferent to him. By virtue of this asceticism the immanence of the rational within the real becomes the theologization of historical reality, and one arrives at reconciliation with reality in the sense sanctioned by the famous preface to the Philosophy of Right. Thus, the result of Hegel’s philosophy contradicts its starting point: immanence had been reached based on the critique of the theologization of the finite; via the Spirit and the “immanent God” immanence becomes the theologization of an empirical reality   However, is it not legitimate to ask whether Marx confused the ­critique of Idealism with the critique of panlogism, and whether his intention was not preserved in the following statement by Croce: “another consequence of the systematic structure is that Hegel, who does feel so strongly the importance of the active life, is led to affirm in his philosophical formulas a contemplative or ascetic ideal of ­human life. In his system the sphere of practical activity is inferior to the sphere of art, of religion, of philosophy; and the objective spirit is inferior to the absolute spirit … Here practice gets to be ­conceived like Spinoza or Fichte conceive the state, as a mean; the end being contemplative life. Hence the rebellion that men of action felt against Hegelian philosophy, and which seems justified, as by a factual proof, by the contemplative and inert attitude it ­promotes among quite a few of its followers”30 – an attitude overcome in Croce’s general revision? Or, from another perspective, is 30 In the essay “Il concetto del divenire e l’hegelismo” of 1912, in Saggio sullo Hegel, 3rd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1917), 154.

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it not legitimate to ask whether his critique applies only to the ­philosophy of the “Spirit in the third person” and therefore, in its philosophically positive aspect, has already been appropriated by Gentile’s Idealism? Here it is important to point out that it does not seem to be the case at all that Gentile’s study of the philosophy of Marx ought to be considered a marginal work of his youth or a complement to Croce’s book, which concerns the non-lasting part of Marxism. It seems, rather, given the fact that in it we already find the themes that Gentile will further develop, that the study of Marx constituted for him a decisive stimulus; but with the result – because he separates Marx’s philosophy of praxis from materialism – of ­confirming his intention to pick up again the revision of Hegel in the sense inaugurated by Spaventa.   Clearly I cannot undertake here an adequate study of this question. I must just observe that it is not legitimate to present as a solution what is only the position of the terms of the question. And that one cannot dismiss so quickly the consideration of Marxism as a philosophy, interpreting it as a nineteenth-century position that arose from the disputes that had to take place within Hegel’s school due to the lack of an internal critique of his philosophy.   And indeed, what prompts us to consider the possible relevance ­today of Marx’s critique is the fact that the elimination of the ­panlogistic image in the neo-Hegelian philosophies does not seem to have suppressed the danger of theologizing a determined historical reality. Besides the logical difficulties it poses, does not Croce’s concept of the “non-definitiveness of philosophy,” in which his ­critique of the Hegelian conclusion is summarized, seem to undergo an inversion into the consecration of liberal civilization, into the “­religion of freedom?”31 As for Gentile, does it not seem legitimate to ask whether there is a relationship between his replication of

31 Here of course I cannot examine in depth whether Croce’s thought can or cannot escape this criticism (which is essentially the one that Gramsci already formulated) [at that time some passages by Gramsci had been published in the journal Rinascita, and I had the impression that my criticism was the same as his. This was confirmed, at least for the most part, by Materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin: Einaudi, 1948), which was published in 1948]. What matters now is only to observe that the recent relevance of Marxism is tightly tied to the impression that it is possible to again apply to Croce the criticism that Marx formulated against Hegel.

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Marxism within Idealism and the practical replication of Marxism within bourgeois society, which is the only possible rigorous definition of Fascism? Or again, in more philosophical terms, are we not ­authorized to ask whether among the roots of the activist aspect (in a pejorative sense) of Actualism there is the cutting off of the philosophy of praxis from materialism? 2. Reconciliation with reality sought in comprehension requires that in order to elevate myself to the universal I forget myself. But then the truth I obtain is a truth that comes after a you must; which, therefore, is not an expression of reality but a secondary image thereof. Reality and thought fall into two opposite totalities, real existence is not thought existence. By making itself absolute, Idealism ends up “­mystifying” reality, severing thought and existence; it ends up ­necessarily reducing the philosopher to the “professor” in the sense that this type, which is completely irreducible to the types of the sophist or the scholastic or the pedant, took during the polemic that marked the disintegration of Hegelianism32 – a professor is “a man who thinks in categories other than the categories in which he lives.” This is where we should look for the origin of the thesis that ideology is a superstructure. One can easily show the existentialist character of the Marxist critique of Hegel.33 But while the philosophers of ­existence stop at the dissociation of philosophy and existence and set the single, the private, the unique, the isolated thinker in opposition to the community, for Marx acknowledging Hegel’s failure is the starting point for a new attempt at reconciliation with reality.   This seems to me the starting point in order to discuss the ­relationship between Marx and existentialism. Today this question is much discussed and variously solved; some people observe that Marx’s position cannot be understood either from the point of view of Idealism or from that of naturalism, and they incline to present it as the best nineteenth-century form of left-wing existentialism,

32 The frequent confusion is due to the fact that the critique of the type of the “professor” became known above all in the form it took in Schopenhauer, in whose thought the themes of the philosophy of the disintegration of Hegelianism come up again, but somehow blurred and warped into a recollection of the past. 33 The essential text in order to prove this is perhaps the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

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and so on; others counter that, from the Marxist point of view, ­existentialism must be viewed as a form of bourgeois thought that has come to confess its essence, as the confession of the individual cut off from his community. This divergence of viewpoints is ­understandable because, in fact, the relationship Marx-existentialism is at the same time a relationship of absolute proximity and of ­radical opposition. From the Marxist point of view existentialism is just the necessary explicative process of the failure of the Hegelian reconciliation with reality, which must end in a declaration of the unreality of the rational and must continue the process of the ­theologization of the empirical all the way to the theologization of the experience of the single individual. At the end of the day, what sets in opposition Marxism and existentialism is fidelity to the Hegelian proposition: one could say that Marxism is what Hegelianism must become in order to be able to overcome the ­existentialist critique. On the other hand, it is also true that the ­tendency to reabsorb Marx’s philosophy into existentialism arises necessarily if one fails to grasp his transition from philosophy to nonphilosophy, the surpassing of philosophy; or, equivalently, if one fails to grasp Marx’s criticism of the eternal man, or also if this criticism is understood as an interpretation of man rather than as a critique of the possibility of philosophy as interpretation. Because in this case the scheme to which every possible existentialist interpretation of Marx can be traced back presents itself as the least inadequate to ­express his thought: Marx criticizes reconciliation between world and man in thought to replace it with reconciliation in work – after all, his man is not the man-object of naturalism. Thus, what Marx wants to say with his critique of Idealism is that we must not replace man with consciousness because consciousness is always consciousness of an existing man (or that we must start from the Dasein, from being-in-the-world, and so forth). 3. So, Marx’s attempt at reaffirming the unity of rational and real ­cannot take any other route but that of a radical atheologization of r­eason. Consequently, man is no longer measured by reason, by the presence of the universal, of the value, of the idea of God, and so on, with all the dependent gnoseogical and ethical categories (interiority, and its practical translation into the category of the “private”), but man is the measure of reason. Furthermore, in connection with the

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critique of interiority, the essence “man” is no longer antecedent to existing man.34 Here is all the difference between Marx’s position and Feuerbach’s. Perhaps this difference can be adequately expressed in this general formula: the inversion of Hegelianism in Feuerbach remains an inversion within philosophy because Feuerbach preserves the essence man and does not arrive at “social man”; for Marx the i­nversion of Hegel cannot be complete unless we go beyond ­philosophy, in the sense we shall see. Therefore, it is not possible to present Marx’s thought as a development of what was implicit in Feuerbach. The Theses do not represent a development but a ­comparison “after the fact” between two autonomous positions, even though, from a strictly historical perspective, reading Feuerbach was for Marx a decisive suggestion. From this all the other differences between the two thinkers also follow: first of all, the different ­meaning of their atheism, which for Marx means the disappearance of the problem of God (so that one could also say that, rigorously speaking, for him the very figure of atheism disappears), whereas for Feuerbach it is a matter of transferring into mankind the object of religious love.   If man thinks not as a participant in reason, or at any rate in a ­universal essence, but as man belonging to a given historical situation, the figure of the “social man” in the specifically Marxist sense of this term arises. Moreover, with the disappearance of the idea of participation thought loses all revelatory character and becomes ­activity that transforms reality: “In practice man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his thinking.”35 We see also that the thesis about turning to practice means the radical inversion of the Platonic-Augustinian theory of ideas: I do not react to the world because of the idea present within me but, rather, my ideas are the articulation of my sense of reaction to the world.   From this follows: (a) the specifically Marxist sense of the work-man; (b) the birth of Communism from the critique of the category of the private, first of all in its metaphysical sense; and (c) the birth from the critique of this same category of Marxist anti-Christianism. We 34 [The terms I used at that time are not entirely correct. What I meant to say is that in reference to Marxism we cannot speak of human nature, given the process of human self-creation and self-transformation]. 35 The 2nd thesis on Feuerbach.

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see then that, for Marx, anti-Christianism and Communism are one; that, therefore, we cannot say that Marx is Communist and also ­anti-Christian; that, instead, because of the philosophical origin of his Communism, it is more correct to say that Marx is Communist b­ecause he is anti-Christian.36   Thus we see the origin of the critique of human alienation and why no iusnaturalistic appeal is implicit in it. We also see how, by ­going down this road, we could easily solve the question of the ­scientific form of Capital that so vexed revisionist commentators. The regime of private property is the social consequence of the ­distinction and priority of culture and interiority with respect to work.37 So, if in Marxist terms man not only works but is work, we see why the regime of private property must be considered a regime of servitude. 4. If thought is thought by social man, man thinks in as much as he is in relationship with other beings, in as much as he is a body. If, ­moreover, thought is praxis – that is, human perceivable activity – then it is expressive and not revelatory thought, and it is nothing ­besides its perceivable manifestation; the upshot is integral materialism, which coincides with “real humanism” because it is not at all a matter of making thought an epiphenomenon of nature.   Vulgar materialism is merely the impoverished translation of this materialism at the level of comprehension. This is the meaning of the first thesis: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” Hence we see how wrong is the interpretation that says that the opposition of materialism and Idealism in the Theses boils down to the opposition

36 About all these points see the cited book by Della Volpe – and about the opposition between Marx and Rousseau, see his previous works: Discorso sull’ineguaglianza (Rome: Ciuni, 1943); and La teoria marxista dell’emancipazione umana (Messina: Ferrara, 1945). 37 The connection between the conception of man as work and the critique of private property is particularly visible in the second and third of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

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of philosophy of action and abstract rationalism. Marx’s true thought is instead that materialism, in order to be consistent, must forgo ­presenting itself as a philosophy of comprehension and must interpret thought not as revelation but as activity that transforms reality. And, conversely, only materialism can achieve a philosophy that is ­action since Idealism can only treat action in the abstract (arriving, basically, at a thought action, which is not a real action).   I will also mention a question that would deserve a lengthy ­development: we also see how incorrect it is to say that Marxist ­realism is primitive or crude or naïve, or to accuse Marx of not ­having understood that matter is the idea of matter, and the like. Marxist realism does not arise at all from “not having taken ­gnoseology into account” or “not having understood Berkeley’s ­lesson,” and so on. It arises, instead, as a consequence of the ­atheologization of reason whose philosophical motivation I have at least briefly mentioned already, even though the nature of this work has not allowed me to go deeper. And it implies posing the question whether the Idealist doubt may not already contain an implicit ­metaphysics; whether, in fact, the precondition for the possibility of doubting may not be the already previously accepted idea of an absolute consciousness. In other words, Marxist realism does not present itself as the naïve naturalistic position that precedes the gnoseological critique but as a way to surpass gnoseologism.

This schematic description of Marx’s process of thought now enables us to understand the central point upon which I particularly want to focus attention: the Marxist surpassing of philosophy, which, at the same time, is meant to be its realization. Philosophy will no longer express itself in the form of a book or a system (comprehension, selfconsciousness, etc. of a realized totality) but in the realization of a totality;38 38 Accordingly, the truth of Marxism can only be verified by its historical result. From this point one can reach a rigorous assessment of the customary criticism that Marxism is a form of messianism. In connection with the questions I have just discussed, this criticism takes the following exact form: Marxism merely shifted to the future the conclusion of history and the theologization of the empirical. But, from what I said, it follows that messianism does not belong at all to authentic Marxism (since its truth can only be a historical truth; we must understand, in this sense, Marx’s well-known sentence that mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve). However, it also follows that this (messianic) figure arises necessarily if Marxism

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in the construction of a society without classes in which the universality of thought will be the result of the suppression of the classes. The totalism of the systematic philosopher is replaced by the totalism of the revolutionary. Hence a very important consequence: let us ask ourselves what “philosophical criticism” means in the Marxist inversion of the PlatonicChristian man. Evidently, it cannot mean “an invitation to go back into oneself,” to methodical doubt, to epoché, and so on. Nor can it mean, in the manner of academic philosophy, “to overcome dialectically” (dialectics meaning a “movement of thought ruled by the principle of contradiction”). Indeed, what is the Marxist criticism of this philosophy (of the eternal questions, of the priests of eternity, etc.)? In certain historical conditions ideas form, and these ideas are expressed in words. Academic philosophy works on these words, abstracted from the historical process with respect to which they are meaningful, trying to achieve a vision of reality “free from contradiction” and concluding in a “philosophic religion” that cannot operate except in an academic atmosphere (an impotence that is glorified in the “isolation of the philosopher from the rabble”), against which Feuerbach had already reconsidered the positive value of popular religion. Nor will philosophical criticism mean showing the inadequacy of a given philosophy to think the particular questions of historical experience: because in that way one still remains at the level of a philosophy of comprehension, of justificatory historicism. For Marxism, philosophical criticism means showing that what the various philosophies present as the eternal man is, on the contrary, always the man of a determined form of society. And how can one show that? If ideas are always the ideas of man in a determined historical situation, to criticize will mean to change the historical situation (consider the Marxist inversion of Feuerbach’s position with respect to religion). Therefore philosophical criticism coincides with the revolution. This is the meaning of the Marxist nexus of theory and practice.

is understood as a conception of the world, with the consequent contradiction between historicism and materialism, which is the core of Croce’s critique, and may be the essential reason he believed that the exigencies posed by actual Marxism could only be satisfied within an Idealist form of historicism – an in-depth analysis would show that these exigencies have always been present in his thought and perhaps actually directed his research.

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Thus we can say, in a rigorous sense, that Marxism is the assumption of politics to be the language of philosophy; or that, from the perspective of Marx’s thought, the party is the philosophical equivalent of the system. Hence an entirely new relationship between philosophy and practice. Politics does not intervene after philosophy in the sense of posing itself the problem of the practical incarnation of a model, which, in turn, has been deduced from a conception of the world. Nor is the philosophical foundation the product of a reflection that is concomitant or ulterior (in the sense that the volition of a given policy and the philosophical search for its foundation are two different things) and subjective, a commitment only for the philosopher who pronounces it (in the manner, to be clear, in which for Croce the religion of freedom is the philosophical foundation of liberalism). On the contrary, political praxis is the articulation of Marxism itself as a “non-philosophy.” So that the question whether one can be a Communist – I mean in the sense of Leninist Communism (Lenin must be recognized as the first who really understood Marx, and I am thinking not so much of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as of Lenin the political writer and party organizer) – and think philosophically differently from Marx is meaningless, strictly speaking. This is because Marx’s philosophy is the political reality itself of Communism, and it is not possible to consistently conceive the elements of Communism’s political practice in their systematic relationship without making reference to the Marxist idea of man (I cannot prove this now, but the proof would not be hard). Hence the absolutely new, and historically unique, character of Lenin’s politics, politics that is at the same time philosophy, the first example of non-intuitive politics. This character has been highlighted often, even though generally its meaning has not been fully grasped (nothing shows how unfamiliar the thesis I have presented has been so far better than the difficulty of Western culture to appropriate the Russian judgment that Lenin was a great politician because he was, in the Marxist sense, a great philosopher; and the frequently repeated statement that a characteristic feature of Lenin was that, in him, the practical interest was much greater than the theoretical interest, and so on). It seems that one can raise an easy objection to this assessment of the relationship between Marx’s philosophy and Communist political practice. Does not the present development of Communist politics take place more along the lines suggested by the revisionist interpretation?

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Are not non-Marxist elements also allowed to join the “new party”? However, this kind of objection does not take into account the inversion of the notion of orthodoxy that is implicit within the general Marxist inversion. It is clear that, according to Marx’s thought, one cannot become a Marxist simply with his “separate intellect,” that is, by becoming convinced of the objective truth of Marxism: this is precisely what would prevent one from being a Marxist because Marx’s philosophy would be changed into a worldview. All too evidently, from the Marxist perspective the process goes from practice to theory and not the other way around. The criticism of an idea follows from its being in contradiction with lived existence.

3. MARXISM AND WESTERN CULTURE We have stated that Marx’s non-philosophy not only arises but also reaches its full expression as a surpassing of philosophy. We still have to prove it by showing how, from the beginning of the Marx-Leninist revolution until today, the change in philosophical views in the West has been indirectly affected by it. This may seem paradoxical since, over the last thirty years, no philosopher was quoted and discussed in the West less than Marx. Not so paradoxical, perhaps, if we think of the ubiquitous judgment that says that the rise of the philosophy of existence cannot be explained without referring to the man of the crisis. Let us briefly mention the quite peculiar and new fashion in which the relationship of ethics and politics must take shape in MarxismLeninism, again in connection with the criticism of the fundamental category of Platonism and Christianity – the idea of participation. In Platonic-Christian thought man is in a necessary relationship with God and in a contingent relationship with society (it is the necessary relationship with God that founds his transcendence with respect to society, and the contingency of his relationship with it). For Marxist atheism the relationship with society becomes necessary and constitutive. Therefore in Marxism the Christian subordination of politics to ethics must be replaced by the absorption of ethics into politics: but it is an absorption of a special nature because it does not mean a simple reduction of ethics to politics, nor, conversely, a moralization of politics, understood in the traditional sense; rather, it is an inclusion of ethics in politics, which is the condition for the latter to develop its realistic character to its extreme consequences.

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Indeed, let us ask ourselves in what sense one can speak of ethics in Marxism: evidently, not as a recognition of the presence of the “divine image” in the other person (or, in rationalist or naturalist translations, of “Reason” or of the “common human nature”); that is, not as a recognition of the ideal community to which both I and the other belong, which implies the duty to limit my freedom to make space for the freedom of the other (and the political formula of the coexistence of freedoms). One can speak of it in the sense that the affirmation of my freedom (my liberation: it is evident that Marxism implies the replacement of the idea of freedom by that of liberation) necessitates the freedom of all (“the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”). Nor, of course, does this task present itself to me as a Sollen but, rather, as a Müssen:39 that is, the liberation of others does not present itself to me as a moral duty; it is one moment of my own liberation, if my nature is social, if, in short, the relationship with society is constitutive of my nature. Volition of the universal is somehow reabsorbed into volition of the individual (it is from this point of view that we must evaluate the Marxist critique of the ethical “true socialism” of the Feuerbachians Hess and Grün, and the thesis that the revolution cannot come about by invoking ethics or man’s true nature but only as a consequence of the social situation in which the subjects find themselves caught). And we see that it is precisely this inclusion of ethics into politics that also makes possible the transition of politics to its highest degree of realism – or, if we want to put it this way, the transition of Machiavellianism to its extreme consistency, but this formula

39 From here we can see how much the relationship between Marx and Kantian ethics, which the revisionists emphasized so much, is not only arbitrary but actually completely distorts the meaning of Marxism. Whereas, on the contrary, Kantian ethics is precisely the form of traditional ethics in opposition to which Marxism took shape. In this regard, consider how the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right essentially represents the mere extension to Hegel’s position of the criticism that this latter had formulated against Kantian ethics, concerning the arbitrariness of universalization and the consequent possible moral mystification of every immoral content (see Philosophy of Right, §135). As always, also here, what Marx imputes to Hegel is infidelity to his initial proposition. A rigorous and complete treatment of Marx’s moral thought is still lacking; however, see the truly important pages 203–8 in Della Volpe’s Libertà comunista. [Here I was referring in particular to the ethical interpretations by the neo-Kantians Cohen, Natorp and Vorländer; and, today, to that by M. Rubel, Karl Marx (Paris: Rivière, 1957)].

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would be imprecise and equivocal, as we shall see below. Therefore, we must observe that such inclusion cannot have the meaning of replacing the method of violence with the method of persuasion. The category of persuasion is tightly linked with Platonic-Christian anthropology, with the thesis of the presence in every man of the idea of God as foundation of his transcendence with respect to history, of his freedom; hence, social change will be possible as a consequence of man’s change (of his conversion, of the reawakening in him of the idea of God); the movement must go from man to society. But in the Marxist position there is no essential man prior to the existing man: therefore, man’s change will be a consequence of social change. The object of love will no longer be man who is “a child of God” because he is such by essence, but future man. Human universality is not something eternal against which the present must be measured, it is a future for the sake of which we must “make good use of the present.” This is why it has been said very correctly that what Marxism is most opposed to is iusnaturalism, that Marxism meets with resistance precisely to the extent that the iusnaturalist tradition is alive, and that its revolution was able to start from Russia because there this tradition was lacking. From here we also see why the well-known characterization of Marx as the “Machiavelli of the proletariat” is a misunderstanding: Machiavellianism separates morality from politics precisely because, in it, the Christian anthropology remains; vice versa, Marx reconciles morality and politics precisely because he negates this anthropology (think of Lenin’s famous sentence: morality is what advances the proletarian revolution). It has been remarked quite correctly that the true Machiavelli is not Machiavelli but the anti-Machiavelli Frederick of Prussia.40 That is, more than politics, Machiavellianism is the denunciation of a false consciousness, of the break in the modern age between religion and politics, such that religion enters the field of political relationships not as a determining principle but as one force in a play of forces, as an instrument. On the contrary, Lenin is not the anti-Marx but the true Marxist; that is, the Marxist revolution has marked the end of Machiavellianism. Machiavelli is no longer useful when it comes to explaining politics from 1917 to the present, exactly because in Machiavelli there is politics and not the ethics of toughness, and

40 See Ugo Spirito, Machiavelli e Guicciardini, 2nd ed. (Rome: Leonardo, 1945).

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between the two positions there is not continuity but a leap. But people say: Communism is Machiavellian by virtue of the concept of tactics since tactics presupposes some principles and some intentions that are known to very few and concealed from many. Here again people fall for the mistake of judging one of Marxism’s positions in relation to an anthropology that is not its own. Conversely, if it is viewed in relation to the anthropology on which it depends, tactics is nothing but the process of conversion to Marxism, which cannot start from theory but must start from practice. We are dealing again with the usual inversion: it is not a matter of making an appeal to man’s interiority in order to renew his existence but of renewing his existence in order to renew his ideas. Hence the stages of the tactics: the conversion of a new Communist begins by understanding that his ideal principles (defence of the person, of morality, of freedom) merely mystify a social reality that does not correspond to them; as a consequence, he is led to the kind of practice that seems to be the only one suitable to destroying such a mystified reality; then it will be his task to spot the contradiction between this practice and his old principles – that is, between his existence and his thinking. With respect to the new anthropology and to the practical stances in which it expressed itself, the attitude of Western culture could only be condemnation.41 But what practical form of resistance could be organized if there was no real surpassing because the philosophical questions that had given rise to Marxist anthropology had not been tackled? Evidently this resistance could only take place as an anti: that is, in a form determined in its essential characteristics by its adversary. If now we consider the a priori characteristics of this resistance, deducing them from the concept of anti-Marxism without surpassing, and compare them with the characteristics it has displayed historically, we can only conclude that there is a perfect match.42 41 Croce’s judgment about Löwith’s Von Hegel bis Nietzsche is significant: “it is the best we have on the topic, even though it is not illuminated by the conviction that the  story it tells is the story of a philosophical decline or, at any rate, of a non-­ philosophy” (Discorsi di varia filosofia, 113). Considering that history, since the First World War, has been the coming to reality of this “decline,” could Croce have declared any better, in so few words, his belonging to the “world of yesterday”? 42 [Today my thinking on this point has changed somewhat. First of all, at that time I did not foresee at all the resistance to Marxism by the society of well-being, which is totally irreducible to Fascist or Nazi models. Moreover, I have become more

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Indeed, consider that anti-Marxism without surpassing means, first of all, Marxism deprived of its ideal character and put to the service of the cause opposite to Marxism (defence of civilization, of values, etc.) with respect to which it is contradictory. Regarding the form of the inversion: unlinked from Marxist anthropology, the philosophy of praxis must turn into activism. As a consequence, the praxis of the idea is replaced by the idea reduced to instrument for action; the moral acceptance of toughness is replaced by violence raised to a value in itself; the inclusion of religion in politics is replaced by the elevation of politics to religion; the acceptance of class struggle for the sake of suppressing distinctions is replaced by the absolutization of distinctions; the new civilization is replaced by the disintegration of the old since its constitutive order of values has been broken (values are now the instrument for the affirmation of a “race,” of a “vitality”). The “defence of civilization” turns upside down into its desecration. Certainly this cannot be the place for a complete analysis of the phenomenological structure of activism (I use this term faute de mieux, knowing well the misunderstandings it can lend itself to). Let us limit ourselves to considering a few of its features that can clarify the meaning of the spiritual situation of the period between the two wars, also with respect to philosophy. We may as well start from the simplest feature: the inversion whereby action, in its simplest sense as transformation of reality, is taken to be a value in itself, with the result of downgrading other subjects to instruments or obstacles. In order for activism to be a total attitude, such downgrading cannot just take a purely moral meaning: it is a total depersonalization of reality – reality is reduced to an object, it becomes real in my action, as the obstacle that I project in front of me in order to overcome it. Therefore, activism implies a form of lived solipsism. The judgment of an activist is the following: “it is my and more convinced of the distinction between Nazism and Fascism. The one that is really anti-Communist, in the sense of recognizing Communism as the primary enemy, is Nazism. Fascism, by contrast, seems to me above all to be an irrationalist competitor of Communism (but this would require a lengthy analysis, which clearly is impossible here). As for the characteristics I used to describe anti-Marxism without surpassing, they largely reflected a consideration of Fascism and of the anti-Fascist experience (I don’t think, in fact, that one can apply to Nazism the solipsistic character that, instead, can be attributed to Fascism; of course, this point would require further specifications). Having made these clarifications, I stand entirely by what I said about the character of Fascism and the moral reaction it elicited].

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action that gives reality to the world.” Correlatively, ideas are reduced to ways of presenting oneself in order to better have at my disposal myself and others (hence the essential insincerity, in the sense of lacking the intimate dimension, which is proper to an activist: whence his rhetoric and his radical incapacity for self-awareness; whence also the characteristic aspect of the “barbarism” of activist phenomena, but it is a barbarism that has nothing to do with primitiveness). Due to such negation of the meaning of intelligence, the subject of activist experiences reduces himself to will; and acting presents itself to him as an imperative (only in action do I affirm my existence as a subject; therefore, not-acting coincides with moral degradation). From this follows the first fundamental contradiction of activism: the action it generates will necessarily be immoral because of the non-recognition of the reality of other people, and, at the same time, it will necessarily have to be mystified as moral – but is not this exactly the contradiction of the bourgeois spirit according to Marx? But there is a second fundamental contradiction. We have already touched upon the essential anti-sociality of the activist attitude; but from another angle we must also say that it is marked by an essential politicity, in the rigorous sense that it cannot realize itself except at the political level. The contradiction between these two fundamental aspects is the reason it can only unfold as destructive of a community. Indeed, the activist will only assume an orientation against because of the absence of any value that specifies it; but, on the other hand, the object of this against remains undetermined, it is not this or that thing but the undetermined totality of the real. In order to determine itself as action, the activist attitude must take as the object of its orientation the most comprehensive order, the order of human relationships, civilization. If, initially, activist movements have been able to present themselves as a “defence of order,” it is in view of a further stage of their possibility to determine themselves concretely as action; it is because their first necessity is to distinguish their revolutionary mindset from that directed at the creation of a new civilization, and, in order to destroy it, they use the given order as an instrument – hence the derivative character of their reactionary aspect. But to see this intrinsic orientation against “every” civilization, just observe how their action unfolded in the direction of disintegrating the civilization they defended. But, on the other hand, we have already seen that this action, which is political in the crudest sense of political realism, must present itself to the activist as the absolute value. As a consequence, activism must bring about an

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elevation of politics to religion, which is a radically new phenomenon in history. It clearly cannot be regarded in any way as a development of Machiavellianism, if Machiavellianism is simply the recognition of the autonomy of the political form. The only possible analogy is, as I already said, with Marxism, except that the inclusion of morals in politics is replaced by the affirmation of the primacy of politics over theoretical thought, morals, religion. Hence the peculiar inverted theocratic form engendered by activism, specified not by the exigency to defend absolute truth but, we might say, by the exigency to defend the lack of truth. Then we can also understand the peculiar and new character of the persecution of the spirit in the totalitarian-activist atmosphere. It cannot be assimilated to the classical types (e.g., the persecutions against Socrates or against Bruno). Socrates’s judges simply declare that his teaching does not benefit the polis:43 his condemnation is a consequence of the dualism of spiritual and political life that characterized the ancient world, which is the inverse of the monism of ours. Bruno’s condemnation is a judgment about the falsity of his philosophy, which the politician does not pronounce as such but as subordinate to religious authority. The totalitarian state born from activism does not defend a metaphysics; rather, it has its own theory of knowledge, so to speak. Reflecting the nature of activism we just discussed, every philosophy is viewed as a way in which a subject portrays himself to himself, pleases himself with himself, a form of spiritual narcissism, of self-creation and self-contemplation of the beauty of the soul. The way it constricts the philosopher, therefore, is not by commanding him to profess a particular theory of truth but by inducing him to pronounce implicitly this judgment: I, as a man of the community, by the mere fact of accepting to belong to it, as a reflection the theory of knowledge that is essential to it, give the philosophy that I affirm as an individual philosopher a different meaning. In other words, my existence as a social man is in no way determined or justified by my private philosophy; so that, from the standpoint of my social existence, my philosophy seems to reduce to my way of mystifying myself, my existential situation. As a consequence, the philosopher’s response must 43 Gaetano De Sanctis writes: the morality of Socrates “in its nature and in its foundation was completely extraneous to the Polis and transcended it, broke the indiscriminate primordial unity of civic life,” Storia dei Greci, vol. 2 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1939), 496.

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also take a different form from the classical types: the philosopher of the past could seek the salvation of his interiority in the doctrine of double truth or, later, in the claim of philosophical freedom – that is, he only asked from the state the right to live for the truth. But this solution is no longer sufficient in front of the totalitarian-activist persecution. The type of the solitary philosopher, who moves away from the community and thinks of the spiritual life as liberation from the world, becomes inadequate. In order to escape the mystification, one needs to look for a practical reversal. One encounters the Marxist question of the politicity of philosophy. Let us now examine briefly – merely establishing the criteria to direct an investigation that naturally would require a much broader development – how the changing of the questions studied by philosophers during the second quarter of our century was tightly connected with this changing of the historical situation and can be explained only by this connection. Thus, let us consider the precise form of the existentialist critique of Idealism: namely, that Idealism emphasizes the universality of the works rather than the singularity of the subject, it views the subject in reference to the works rather than the works in reference to the subject. Clearly, in the face of the existential situation of the individual cut off from the community, the Idealist notion that the person is instrumental to the work had to look like a philosophy of mystification, or evasion, or “divertissement,” and so on – or, in any case, the normal philosophy of calm regions of being. We see here that interpreting existentialism, as Croce tends to do, as an outdated continuation of a concern that was valid only in reference to the abstract and intellectualistic rationalism lingering in Hegel’s philosophy – and which supposedly was already addressed by Croce’s revision of Hegelianism – is in vain. Actually, that irrationalism, whose element of truth Croce had sorted out and preserved, polemicized against Hegel in the name of a multiplicity taken to be an object of works that could not find a place in Hegel’s synthesis. With respect to the existentialist concern taken in its specific sense, Croce’s position cannot be preservation of what is valid but, rather, moralistic denunciation of the “fruitless turmoils,” of the “abandonment to a psychological dissatisfaction which has no philosophical relevance,” and so on. We also understand that we should not look either for the origin of existentialism in a decadentist attitude that makes “the crisis not an object

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of disapproval, nor the springboard for a leap forward, but its destiny, its last refuge, and finds its pleasure in this degradation.”44 In fact, please observe that stating that the Western crisis came about because of a failure to surpass Marxism is fundamentally equivalent to pointing out that one of its essential aspects is being unaware of its own historicity. It is precisely this lack of awareness of its own historical character that conditions the transition from the crisis to philosophy – the fact that it understands the present historical consideration of man as the occasion to decipher the existential situation of man tout court. Hence, we see that the opposite meanings by which the usual expression “philosophy of crisis” is normally understood are both wrong. One meaning is as awareness of the crisis and thus as the starting point to overcoming it: but existentialism is not awareness or overcoming of the crisis because lacking awareness thereof is precisely what allows it to form as a philosophy. The other meaning is as a product of the crisis and its expression in philosophy, with a spectrum of negative interpretations. One interpretation denounces existentialism as a philosophy of decadentism, a lack of ethical reaction, while at the same time recognizing in it an important stimulus to philosophical reflection; another considers it a manifestation in philosophical form of the very same revolt against reason in which we ought to identify the essence of the crisis; a third interpretation, by going down this road, ends up making existentialism the philosophical equivalent of Nazism. The second meaning is mistaken because existentialism arises not as a clarification of the idea of man, which is the transcendental condition of the crisis, but as the ontologized recognition of the break between the individual and the community, which has been the unintended result of the crisis. We can say that it is an expression of the crisis but only in as much as the crisis is suffered and viewed as natural and insurmountable (and thus revealing man’s ontological condition). Hence we also see that it is not entirely correct to define existentialism as a reaction to the crisis but, rather, as inside the crisis; because the insurmountability of the break between the individual and the community, to which the 44 Norberto Bobbio, La filosofia del decadentismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1944), 20. Bobbio’s thesis is true only in reference to the result of the existentialist attitude, or to stopping at it. To use Kierkegaardian language in the precise Kierkegaardian meaning, it is true of the existentialism of the disciple and not of that of the teacher.

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ontologization of the crisis must lead, does not allow existentialism to generate an ethical or social stance (hence the decadentist aspect, which, however, must be seen as a result and not as the origin of the existentialist spiritual process). However, the condition that allows the philosophy of existence to form also sets its theoretical limit. Its greatest merit lies in its critical function: it relativized the theoretical significance of Idealism, highlighting the character as a choice, as a presupposition, of its initial foundation. On the other hand, I believe (I say “I believe” mostly because I cannot give the proof here) that one can show the theoretical gratuitousness of all the existentialist forms, meaning the impossibility of going from the philosophies of existence to an existentialism that is their true and rigorous form. Perhaps this is the most remarkable characteristic of the existentialist trend, that each of the forms in which it expresses itself annihilates the other as a philosophy. Therefore, one ought to illuminate how religious existentialism’s critiques of secular existentialism are final and unsurmountable, and vice versa.45 Of course, the following judgment is a problem and not a solution: “as a consequence of the original contradiction highlighted above, the structure of the existentialist experience of thought is such that it cannot give rise to a philosophy that is its truly rigorous form, but must necessarily express itself in a plurality of forms, whose philosophical value resides in the fact that each of them annihilates the other as a philosophy, by revealing the negation of ontological possibilities that lies at its foundation, but without being able to constitute itself positively as a philosophy.” I postpone to some other occasion an attempt to prove this. But let us suppose that we accept it as a working hypothesis, and this is not asking too much because even a superficial knowledge of the literature on existentialism is enough to confirm that many of the current critiques concur with this judgment. It will follow that the most conspicuous phenomenon marking the philosophy of the period after the Marxist-Leninist revolution is a panoply of various philosophies that mutually annihilate and do not surpass each other; that this annihilation takes place under the pressure of a historical situation, which, in the final analysis, is generated by Marxism; that, on the other hand, this 45 It seems to me that this mutual annihilation of the two existentialist directions is lived in Jean Wahl’s position and leads to a “non-philosophy,” which is not, like the Marxist one, a surpassing of philosophy but its dissolution.

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mutual annihilation is the form in which the Marxist critique must necessarily articulate itself: not as surpassing-preserving but as annihilation (historical, and not dialectical, surpassing) of philosophy (in as much as the latter has as its object eternal man, the Spirit, etc.; recall the Marxist sense of philosophical critique that I explained earlier). Consider also the peculiar form of Marx’s relevance today, the characteristics that distinguish it from Hegel’s relevance during the first quarter of our century and from Kierkegaard’s relevance over the last twenty years. Hegel’s relevance had the formula “what is alive and what is dead” – the contradiction in Hegelian philosophy between the beginning and the system, which leads to surpassing it. In the philosophy of existence it is a matter of transposing Kierkegaard’s experience into philosophy. Vice versa, the return to Marx today does not take place at all as surpassing, or as transposition into, philosophy but, rather, as “revelation of the authentic.” It is about surpassing not Marx but his interpreters, including Engels. But how can this return to the authentic Marx not appear anti-historical? Would it not seem natural to oppose to it a critical and non-dogmatic form of Marxism that enriches Marx with the subsequent Western cultural experience? And yet, we have already seen that this aspiration can only be addressed by going back before Engelism, before the first reconciliation of Marxism with the dominant culture in the West. How can this be? Only because all the history of Marxist thought since 1848, the conclusion of Marx’s philosophical period, has been the history of its dialogue – in the form that is proper to it and that nobody has noticed – with this culture and its victory. If Marx’s non-philosophy is the annihilation of philosophy, its meaning could only become fully visible after this victory. *** But let me comment on the meaning of this victory. Let us take as a given what I have outlined and think to be true, but which for now I have just stated in the form of a question, without proving it. Namely, that Marxism constitutes a critical claim, which is definitive with respect to the philosophies that went beyond Hegel but kept Hegel’s judgment with respect to the philosophies of the past (they kept it in a particular way, for sure; but of course now I cannot linger on the meaning of this “particular way,” which is how existentialism is relative to Hegel). Shall we conclude that Marxism faces no adversaries, or that it faces the

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bourgeois world at the stage when it is confessing its own lack of truth? Shall we conclude, therefore, that Marxism’s victory at the ideal level has already taken place, no matter how strong may be the hurdles that it can still meet at the strictly historical-political level? I believe that such a conclusion would be completely illegitimate. And this would be the occasion to define another aspect of the present relevance of Marxism – its problematic character. In fact, it seems to me that its present relevance coincides with the exact definition of the problematic character of our time. Such problematic character is marked by the loss of every “permanent conquest” beyond which, but on the basis of which, one can build (statements like “we cannot go back before Kant, or Hegel”). Hence that insecurity of tradition, which is the constitutive character of the crisis; and the complete antinomy between two opposites – the end of Christianity or its restoration. Indeed, let us consider Marxism’s character of being a non-philosophy. It is equivalent to saying that Marxism can only present itself as historical truth. Any attempt to present it as eternal truth immediately becomes contradictory (i.e., its fundamental proposition, that every philosophy is the philosophy of man in a determined historical situation, evidently cannot be thought as an eternal truth without a contradiction). But, now, in what sense can Marxism be thought to be the truth of our time? Or, actually, in what sense could Marx think of it as such? I am not able, at this point, to find any other answer but the following, which is based on its fidelity to the Hegelian conclusion of the history of philosophy: “To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage has its own form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are preserved” (the final words of Hegel’s History of Philosophy).46 Observe also that in him the transition itself into nonphilosophy is justified by the conclusion of philosophy in Hegel (this is the process of thought of the youthful dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus; but one could investigate whether Marx’s certainty of the historical truth of his position is always conditioned by it). After philosophy makes itself total with Hegel, the first position of the spirit can only be absolute non-philosophy.

46 [TN] Georg F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896), 564. Del Noce’s quotation is somewhat loose.

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Nothing is lost. In other words, Hegel could think that his philosophy was the truth of his time because of the surpassing-preserving. But we have seen that, for Marx, the process of thought started by Hegel must lead, in order not to contradict itself by falling into the theologization of the empirical, not to the Idealist surpassing of religion into philosophy, to Christianity made philosophy, but to the end of Christianity, to anti-Christianity – and here a very important question should be posed, the decisive question, perhaps, of Marxist criticism. Whereas on one side Marx shows that fidelity to the initial Hegelian proposition must lead to the annihilation of Hegel’s position, reciprocally can Marxism think of itself as truth without surreptitiously invoking the truth of Hegel, which it annihilates?47 However, let us now leave aside this question and its possible consequence – namely, that Marxism represents at the same time not only the conclusion but also the self-destruction of historicism – and let us even suppose that there is no contradiction and that Marxism is the truth of thought “past” Hegel. It is still true that it represents the unveiling of the meaning of the experience of thought that starts from Hegel, from which one must arrive not at a synthesis but at an antithesis, not at the surpassing-preserving of Christianity, but at anti-Christianity (in no way can Marxism be presented as a preservation or sublation of Christianity: the only common theme, the equal dignity of each human person, takes a completely different meaning, and not because of the different organism of thought in which it is inserted but because of the different process by which it is reached: in Christianity, starting from the presence in each man of the divine image, in Marxism, starting from the interdependence of freedoms, so that the freedom of all becomes a condition for my freedom). To summarize, then (and with the inevitable imprecision of one who has to cram into few lines a host of open questions), Marxist historicism is a historicism that concludes in the anti position. But for this reason, as pure historicism, it cannot

47 That is: whether historicism may be thought as a truth only if it is historicism that justifies, even though the conclusion, somehow, of history is an inevitable figure of such historicism; and whether when it makes itself revolutionary historicism does indeed obey a necessity that is intrinsic to its essence but, at the same time, loses the possibility of being thought of as truth. The process of thought from Hegel to Marx could be the proof (I am not saying it is, I am just posing the question) of the unsolvable antinomy of historicism.

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solve the problem of its own meaning: whether its claim is valid against Christianity, or whether instead Marxist historicism is merely the inversion of an inadequate and decayed form of Christianity, the sign of a historical crisis (or again: its proposition could be held to be valid only under the presupposition that its adversary is measured by history; while Christianity’s affirmation of transcendence excludes precisely that it can be judged by history). Therefore, the restoration of Christianity presents itself even after Marxism as a possible thought: Marxism only goes as far as warning us that such restoration is not possible except by reaching a position of thought whereby Hegel’s philosophy can be regarded as a decline. Thus, the theoretical-historical question of clarifying our historical situation becomes that of Hegel’s place in the history of philosophy, no longer in the sense of whether we can go beyond Hegel but in the sense of whether something was lost with Hegel – or again: the process of thought “beyond Hegel” concludes in the necessity of the question whether Hegel’s position may not be regarded as a decline.

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Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948)

1. THE QUALITATIVE LEAP I think it is important to pick up again the topic that Felice Balbo discussed in the last issue of this journal because of the terminal character, so to speak, of his piece.1 It expresses with definitive conceptual clarity the presuppositions and, at the same time, the philosophical implications of the attitude that has given rise – all over the world, we can say – to the cultural-political movements that I will call the “Christian left,” using an approximate term borrowed from politics. But when I speak of definitiveness, it is not only to express an evaluation; I also mean to say that, in my judgment, it is impossible to go any further along this line, in the direction that has been followed so far, and that any possible step forward requires a clarification of the illusory character of what I will call Christian-Marxism. To start, it will be helpful to elucidate the conceptual scheme within which every possible discourse by leftist Christians takes place. It seems to me that it can be expressed in rigorous terms as follows.

1 Felice Balbo, “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” in Rivista di filosofia 2 (1948): 105–31. [Here, of course, I was not just considering the ideas presented by Balbo in his essay, as rich as it was, but I was trying to objectivize to myself – in section I – the philosophical-historical perspective of every possible form of “leftist Catholicism,” considered in its most extreme and rigorous stance].

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Marx’s discovery (his “moral Galileism”2) consisted in a radical extension of scientific reason so that it gets to embrace man’s entire “practicalperceptible” activity. Evidently, such characterization should imply that Marxism cannot directly address ontological questions. In fact, however, Marx, followed until today by all authentic Marxists, from Engels to Stalin, has understood the theses of verification in practice and reciprocity of theory and practice as tantamount to the assertions that “nothing exists except what is experimentally verifiable, what is historically determined, and man is found only and with no residual in work, he is nothing prior to acting, interiority and intention are pure abstractions,” and so on. These theses are actually ontological because they are not amenable to experimental verification. In other words, Marx ontologized scientific reason into absolute scientific reason and therefore understood his discovery as radical atheism and the negation of every metaphysics. Thus, is it not reasonable to conclude that advocating the reduction of absolute scientific reason to mere scientific reason means exiting Marxism? And exiting in the form of “surpassing” (i.e., Marxism better understood based on different “premises” and “presuppositions”), which expresses, in a strictly philosophical sense, the essence of every form of revisionism? However, if we reflect more deeply, we have to recognize that Marxism’s nature contains the possibility of a form of development that is unknown to speculative philosophy. Its critique of metaphysical rationalism means essentially the following: metaphysical rationalism falls short of reality, results in a gap between truth and reality, and in order to reconcile reason and reality one needs to move from metaphysical reason to scientific reason, connected to the “worldly base” by practical verification. Let us see what follows necessarily from this appeal to praxis. Undoubtedly, in as much as it poses itself as absolute scientific reason, Marxism cannot directly recognize metaphysical difficulties. However, in as much as it acts as scientific reason connected necessarily to the worldly base – albeit giving a representation of itself as absolute scientific reason – its anti-metaphysical refusal in the end simply means that it can only encounter the metaphysical objection incarnate in historical forces, in “practical-perceptible” realities. But those who 2 [TN] An expression due to Galvano della Volpe (1895–1968), who argued that Marx’s greatest contribution was to extend to the sciences of history and society the empirical approach that had been pioneered by Galileo Galilei in the natural sciences.

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recognize a metaphysical reality must necessarily affirm that, in such form, it cannot not meet the metaphysical objection, and that the objection can become a stage of its development; this simply because Marxism is not scientific reason that deals with human reality as natural reality but, rather, scientific reason that reaches human reality (or, if you prefer, because it is dialectic and not naturalistic sociology). Therefore the reciprocity of theory and practice makes possible a development by a qualitative or dialectic leap, which is something else altogether than the “surpassing” that is proper to speculative philosophy. In surpassing, a truth is “preserved” but “transvalued”; conversely, in a qualitative leap a truth reveals itself better in the act of overcoming the contradictions that are placed in front of it by historical reality. The qualitative leap is a figure required by Marxism itself because it coincides with the “openness” or “experimentality” that characterizes it and that it cannot give up except at the cost of hardening up, as “scholastic Marxism,” into the fixedness of speculative philosophy. Thus, we understand how the new position makes it possible to avoid “surpassing,” while it remains historically true that it is not at all a mere “bringing to light” of what is already present in originary Marxism, nor is it an “analytical development” – that is, a “discursive” development – of what in Marxism is already implicit. Perhaps this reasoning will become clearer if we specify the stance of leftist Christians compared to that of Lenin. Lenin’s theoretical work has been to reclaim original Marxism (and thus, at the same time, its atheism and its nexus of theory and practice) against revisionism. This theoretical work has conditioned the revolution. Today, a further stage of the revolution – the problems that Communism must solve in order to win in the West; the transition from pure proletarian dictatorship to popular democracies, which requires a correlative transition from an ideology of the “isolated proletariat” of pure “domination” or “defence” to an ideology of “domination” and “consensus”; and so on – requires that the focus shift to experimentalism rather than atheism to the point that the two figures must turn out to be in contradiction. Is this change of focus just tactical? Those who think so have failed to realize that, for Marxism, this appeal to the historical situation does not at all mean exiting philosophy; that is, they still approach Marxism as if it were a speculative philosophy. However, does the reduction of Marxist reason to mere scientific reason not seem to imply the affirmation of the “philosophical

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neutrality” of Marxism? And does such affirmation not water down its revolutionary spirit? Can we still speak of revolution when it does not affect “values”? Shall we think that Marxism aims only at an economic transformation within an order of values that is given, or in any case not directly called into question by Marxism? Then we would reach the following conclusion: Communism should regard the revolution just as a “faster pace” of evolution and could claim to be revolutionary exclusively because, strictly as a historical-political judgment, it thinks that today the evolution could not take place without this “faster pace.” But this is not the outlook of leftist Christians. On the contrary, they think they can also preserve the Marxist philosophical critique,3 and actually give it its full significance because ontologization would end up narrowing down precisely the significance of Marxism’s most original theme, the critique of mystification, leading to a sort of “atheistic mystification” that is not of a different nature than “religious alienation” just because it is apparently oriented in the opposite direction (and supposedly today this similarity of nature is becoming visible because atheistic alienation collaborates in practice with religious alienation in an anti-revolutionary sense by making possible the configuration of the political struggle as a religious war, which Marxism is powerless to fight without the qualitative leap). “If scientific reason discovers that we must ‘criticize theoretically’ and ‘subvert in practice’ the ‘earthly family’ in order to dissolve the ‘holy family,’ clearly this operation does not operate only against ‘religious ideology’ eliminating man’s alienation outside of the world, but operates also in favor of the religious truth that is ‘made worldly’ in the ‘religious ideology.’ Indeed, in order to defend itself from scientific reason which subverts its ‘worldly base’ and to preserve itself as real truth, the truth of the ‘holy family’ is forced, so to speak, to abandon the mystified historical formulas in which it has expressed itself, and to re-express itself with formulas that are no longer mystified.”4 Marxism “opens up the possibility of a non-mystified investigation of the question of being,” “it opens the way to non-mystified religious

3 Here lies the difference between the leftist Christian interpretation and the purely methodological interpretation, for a critique of which I refer the reader to my essay “La non-filosofia di Marx e il comunismo come realtà politica,” in Atti del Congresso internazionale di Filosofia, vol. 1 (Milan: Castellani, 1947). [TN: in this volume, pages 169–214]. 4 Balbo, “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” 119–20.

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work.” What do these formulas, which come up constantly in the authors who belong to this trend, mean exactly? It is evident that Marxism reduced to scientific reason cannot speak directly about ontological questions. It is no less evident that no position of thought, as a force acting in history, can avoid being examined by scientific reason. And it is not true that the form in which a position enters the course of history is not affected by its theoretical truth. For example, the claim by metaphysical rationalisms to exhaust reality implies necessarily the elevation of a determined historical order to absolutely valid order, to the terminal and insuperable stage of the historical process, and the depiction of the process as the solution of “particular questions” within that order (i.e., the mythologization of that order, which is confused with “history”). In other words, metaphysical rationalisms do not become reactionary ideologies simply because certain social classes bend them to this purpose (the partial truth of this statement lies in the recognition of the unquestionable fact that metaphysical rationalisms do not take shape intentionally as reactionary ideologies). They are such by nature even though they reveal it (to their own authors too, of course) only at the time when they enter the course of history. It is not a matter, that is, of judging a philosophy based on its ideological function; rather, it is the ideological function that a determined philosophy is inevitably forced to serve that manifests its limitation, its inadequacy to reality. Supposedly, metaphysical rationalisms and historicist forms of Idealism fall under this critique of mystification and show their strictly philosophical limitations. So do the various forms of positivism, criticism, and existentialism, although a longer discussion would be needed to clarify this point (see the comments on this matter in Balbo’s essay). A certain “Christian type” falls under it as well: dualist Christianity, Christianity that presents religious life as “liberation from the world.” In the history of Christian thought we find two different conceptions of the relations between religion and politics. The first (the dualistic one) says: reconciliation – whereby men no longer feel distinct by social condition – can only happen in religious life, in front of God. Undoubtedly, inequalities in themselves have no sacred character: rather, they are consequences of sin (and the task of religious thought is not to sanction their sacred character but to remove the appearance of it in order to establish spiritual communion beyond them). However, precisely because of the origin of the inequalities, the quest to erase them cannot succeed (and so we have a form of conservatism, not directly willed as

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such, but consequent to the critique of the will to change). To speak of a rational order to be established in history makes no sense if spiritual life is defined precisely as liberation from the world: then, every attempted change can only lead to another order of inequalities. One can try to correct them, but always keeping in mind that charity remains the best option. Inequalities are really surpassed in the transition to the religious point of view, which is a moral surpassing, in the recognition that true life is not earthly life and in the subsequent loss of importance of inequalities with respect to the true life. In this way alienation (in the general sense of not feeling part of a community as subjects) is suppressed and the single individual can deem himself to be an end of the whole social organism in as much as he recognizes the existing order (and it does not matter whether this order, considered in the abstract, may not be the best possible one; it is accepted and regarded as the least bad in the given historical condition because any attempt at radical change, due to the commitment it requires, implies a distraction from the true end) as the order that guarantees the external conditions necessary to the exercise of religious life (there is a right to rebel only when these external conditions disappear). One should also observe that the Marxist polemic targets only this conception viewed as the Christian solution tout court. See, for instance, Marx: “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself.”5 Today the historical situation brings Christians back to the other type of relation (which is also classic in the tradition), in which political commitment is perceived not as other than religious commitment, or anyway as external to it (in the sense I just mentioned of defending external conditions), but as intrinsically required by the religious commitment itself in order to preserve the religious values in their purity, to avoid that they be debased into instruments (mystified) and that in this debasement they cease to be values and deserve to be loathed and fought against. The fact that today the political struggle presents itself as a religious war, with the impiousness and a-dialecticity that characterize this phenomenon, is an aspect of precisely this debasement. The condition that makes possible religious wars is exactly the “mystification” of God, whereby mankind breaks up into forces that recognize and defend God

5 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Ed. Dirk Struik, trans. M. Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 108.

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only to “use him” (but is a God “that is used” still God? And does “defending God” mean anything?) and forces that, in order to deny this Goddebased-to-idol, also deny God (this is why religious wars are actually class struggles; but it is also true, according to leftist Christians, that without the Christian mediation, without the mediation by this type of Christian politics, even the forces that would stand for God and not for the idol are pushed to the side of reaction, and the appearance of religious war endures). Or, again: this second type of relation is necessary in order for religion not to be reduced from total attitude to a mere form or stage of the spirit; and one ought to further ask whether every denial of religion always presupposes its previous reduction to form or stage and is inevitable after this reduction. Of course, the criticism of dualistic Christianity ceases to be meaningful if it is limited to a mere political revision; it necessarily involves a philosophical revision. On this issue, I will only indicate a few essential reference points. Namely, the radical anti-modernism (modernism = bourgeois Christianity) of leftist Christianity, which is oriented towards a “Dominican” Thomism in opposition to the ordinary Suarezian Thomism (in Suarezism, the philosophical transcription of the Molinist man of pure nature, the Christian-rationalist compromise, begins) and above all in opposition to Christian forms of Platonism and existentialism (which conclude in the “horror of the mass.” At the end of the 1600s, Pascal and Malebranche – the forefathers, respectively, of modern Christian existentialists and Platonists – agree in recognizing the dualist type as the true political attitude of a Christian). We now have all the elements to elucidate what is the most general presupposition of this position. According to orthodox Marxists, the outcome of the revolution is supposed to be the “disappearance of the question of God” (God who disappears without “leaving an empty spot”; it is not even atheism any longer because atheism is the answer to a question, it is a religious solution). According to leftist Christians, on the contrary, the outcome is supposed to be purified Christianity. Because certainly Marxism, after the qualitative leap, cannot say anything explicitly about the ontological problem; but, as we have seen, its scientific rationality has a philosophical significance, and the only metaphysics that withstands it is a restored Christian metaphysics. Thus, Marxism is entirely re-understood as a moment of purification of Christianity. And, we should specify, as somehow internal to Christianity because it is not a matter of being an occasion for a purification that takes place by antithesis;

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rather, Christianity will be able to express itself in forms that are no longer mystified only by collaborating with the Marxist revolution. From this perspective, the leftist Christian position truly deserves the name, which I do not recall having seen explicitly used yet, of Christian-Marxism.

2. CRITIQUE OF THE CHRISTIAN-MARXIST INTERPRETATION The stumbling block for this interpretation is in the 6th Thesis on Feuerbach: “But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not attempt the criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled … [to comprehend the human essence] only as ‘genus,’ as a dumb internal generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals.”6 Is it legitimate to say that the Marxist philosophical reduction of the human essence to a historically determined essence is merely a rationalist residue,7 a surreptitious attribution of ontological meaning to an affirmation that is valid only at the level of science (since scientific reason can only consider man in his historical determinacy)? This is what Christian-Marxists think, and they must necessarily say so, as we shall see, also at the level of a purely historical interpretation because otherwise their position collapses. Or is the opposite true, instead: that only the criticism of the concept of human nature makes possible the transition from metaphysical reason to scientific reason (or perhaps one should say from metaphysical rationalism to integral historicism, given the very particular character of Marxist scientific reason)? It makes it possible, mind you, not only in Marx’s thought process, but logically. Evidently, this is the crux of the question. Consider well: at the bottom of the Christian-Marxist reasoning there is, as a precondition that people assume with a greater or lesser 6 [TN] Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 83–4. The words in brackets depart slightly from Marx’s original text, which Del Noce paraphrases in order to tie together the two parts of the quote into one coherent sentence. 7 In short, the affirmation of “social man,” which of course is something else entirely (but perhaps it still needs to be said) than the affirmation that “the concrete individual always belongs to a determined social form.” It also differs radically (because of the emphasis on the social aspect) from the affirmation that is fashionable today that in man existence is antecedent to essence.

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awareness, a line of interpretation that identifies the essence of Marx’s philosophical thought with his anti-Hegelian stance; that is, with his critique of rationalism tout court; and the atheologization of reason and the transition to scientific reason are understood as moments of this critique – which, in order to be completed, still need the qualitative leap (the very choice of words that have a neo-positivistic sound, like “surreptitious attribution of ontological value” and so on, says something) – rather than as moments of the extreme radicalization of rationalism. Hence the central role that is attributed to the themes that Marx accepts from Feuerbach: mystification and the criticism of speculative philosophy (we must not forget that about these points, taken in themselves, in their definition, apart from the original application of the mystification thesis to the critique of Hegel’s theory of the state, Marx did not say anything that Feuerbach had not said already). Hence also the reduction of Marx’s originality to the construction of social science and the identification of the novelty of his thought in the 2nd Thesis (“In practice man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his thinking”) considered independently of the 6th rather than logically conditioned by it. Let us list more consequences – which is important because in this way we will be able to entirely re-deduce the historical interpretation that makes possible the Christian-Marxist position. Marxist social science will be able to study man only as “ensemble of the social relations.” But, on the other hand, Marx still accepts Feuerbach’s central idea, the inversion of Hegel in philosophy: “We only need always make the predicate into the subject and thus, as the subject, into the object and principle. Hence we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked, pure, bare truth.”8 This is the “inverted transcendentalism” that, when it remains in Marxism, necessarily affirms an inverted “religious view of the world and of history,” the “scientific reason that carries negative ontological implications” that Balbo talks about.9 If this is the case, the anti-Hegel stance must develop by necessity into the antiFeuerbach interpretation of the 6th Thesis: if the object of scientific

8 [TN] Ludwig Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy” (1842), in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. L.S. Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 156. 9 Balbo “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” 115–16.

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reason is only social being, and if scientific reason exhausts reality, one must criticize Feuerbach’s human nature. But actually Marx’s thought process is completely different. It can be characterized as the reaffirmation against Feuerbach of Hegel’s discovery, the unity of rational and real, after having accepted Feuerbach’s criticism of the form in which this unity had been thought by Hegel. This is, substantially, also Engels’s interpretation, in his famous pamphlet on Feuerbach, although in Engels the reaffirmation of Hegel seems to get confused with the preservation of his dialectics understood as simple preservation.10 Therefore, there is nothing paradoxical in affirming it. But if we look in depth at its implications, we find that it invalidates almost all the directions followed by the critical literature on Marxism. Indeed, it establishes a criterion whereby historical materialism must be understood in primis as absolute rationalism, and only because it is absolute rationalism as absolute historicism, and only because it is absolute historicism as absolute materialism as well. This rules out all interpretations of historical materialism as a “species” of the “genus” materialism, or as a contradictory synthesis of materialism and historicism. And, above all, it lets us see that Marx was forced by his own assumption to look for an absolutely new philosophical position (the only absolutely new one that appeared, or that could appear, after Hegel). His assumption implied, in fact, accepting all the philosophical negations formulated by Hegel. Therefore, the road to any “reform” of Hegelianism via a partial “return” to previous positions (which is what a reform of Hegelianism must always be) was blocked: no matter whether these positions may be Kant, or Fichte, or moralism, or humanism, or naturalism, or the need of the single individual, or religious experience, or the Enlightenment-inspired materialism invoked by Feuerbach.11 I do not need to name the interpretive positions that are refuted as a result.

10 Regarding the inadequacy of Engels’s concept of dialectics, the remarks by G. Della Volpe in the essay “Marx e il segreto di Hegel,” in Marx e lo stato moderno rappresentativo (Bologna: UPEB, 1947), are very important. 11 “Where the anti-scholastic, sanguine principle of French sensualism and materialism unites with the scholastic stodginess of German metaphysics, is there alone life and truth … The true philosopher … must be of Franco-German descent” (Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in The Young Hegelians, ed. S. Stepelevich [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 164).

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After he accepted Feuerbach’s critique, Marx could only articulate Hegel’s contradiction as follows: Hegel failed to see that the unity of the rational and the real implies the collapse of the old speculative concept of philosophy as “comprehension.” A philosophy of comprehension is actually a philosophy of transcendence; inserted into an atmosphere of immanence it generates a new transcendence inside historicism, the closing12 of the present order of reality and its opposition to the future as sacred.13 But, according to Marx, this closing devalues Hegelianism because it shows that Idealism, precisely in the act of making itself absolute, undergoes indeed an inversion into materialism, but into “crass materialism,” in the literal sense of these words, because what defines vulgar materialism with respect to other theologizations of the finite – which is what metaphysical stances reduce to, in Marx’s view – is the immediate theologization of the empirical. Or, again, in reference to the theory of mystification: from the standpoint of speculative theology, the quest for a “comprehension” of the unity of rational and real will develop as an effort to understand the reason of which the real is a phenomenon (appearance, allegory, etc.). But by doing so one again separates the rational from the real, disincarnates it and fixes it. Understanding the rationality of the real implies that reason, thus disincarnated, is taken to be the subject of which the real (the particular, the empirical) is the predicate. But then what happens is that the particular, elevated to a predicate, ends up being considered an “essential manifestation” of reason; the unity of the rational with the real is replaced by the confusion of the rational with the empirical, by the theological mystification of the empirical.

12 [TN] “Conchiusione” in the original, which is an archaic form of conclusione (conclusion) but also evokes the idea of becoming chiuso (closed). I use “closing” as a way to try to capture both these meanings. 13 Such transcendence, if we consider it carefully, is intimately connected with the division of society into classes. The bourgeoisie represents spiritual values, it is the “culture” class, which plays the role of “mediating economic struggles by making recourse not to economic but to ethical-political concepts.” It is the “class which is not a class,” Hegel’s allgemeine Stand, which takes care of the allgemeine Interessen. See also Hegel’s justification of private wealth as the means of sparing the general class from direct work (Philosophy of Right, §205) and Croce’s concept of bourgeoisie [TN: in the original, this footnote appears as a long parenthetical statement enclosed by em dashes].

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However, this part of Marx’s thought is just a radical development of Feuerbach’s anti-Hegelian critique. Now, how can one preserve the unity of the rational and the real (and avoid Feuerbach’s humanism, reason as man’s accident, etc.) after such an extreme development of the antiHegelian stance? That is, how can one reconcile the reality of the rational with its radical atheologization? Evidently, for Marx there is only one obligatory route, the critique of the essence “man,” of human nature, the thesis that being man belonging to a determined historical situation exhausts being human. We can also say that man is thus reduced to a moment in the process of praxis; as long as we realize, however, that this does not mean affirming man’s passivity because such an affirmation would re-establish a transcendence of praxis with respect to man – Praxis would be given the place of reason or of the Spirit – and by this route one would go back to “Hegelian orthodoxy,” to simple inversion.14 An immediate consequence of this critique of the essence “man” is the critique of selfconsciousness: thought does not reveal anything and reduces without residue to practical thought, to activity that transforms reality. Notice that so far I have said nothing original. I have only commented on the theses, which recognize as Feuerbach’s merit that he really distinguished perceptible objects from intelligible objects (which is an implicit reference to the theory of mystification) and, as his limitation, that he did not conceive of human activity as activity that poses the object (and as a consequence he did not understand the revolutionary meaning of practical-critical activity), and that he did not carry out the critique of the essence “man” – even though the connection between these two critiques is not developed analytically. The validity of this interpretation is confirmed by the fact that only from it can one deduce all the aspects of Marxism, both in the strictly philosophical and in the political sense. But let us stick to the point under discussion, the so-called (using an expression that can give rise to misunderstandings) transition from metaphysical reason into scientific reason. Since for Marx thought (and

14 Regarding the meaning of human activity in Marxism, it is worth recalling the famous formula in the 3rd Thesis: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionary practice.”

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language) are not representative of essences,15 the value of a philosophy cannot be measured by the evidence of its principles. There is no principle that in itself is not susceptible to being contradicted (this position is the foundation of the thesis that every philosophy is historical). Therefore, only one route is left: the value of any philosophy will be measured by its historical result; that is, philosophies will only be historical working hypotheses, verified experimentally by the real operations they produce. In other words, Marx is forced, after his critique of the apprehension of essences, to shift the discussion with other philosophers to the plane of historicity; to seek experimental verification as the only guarantee of the historical truth of his philosophy. This clarifies, by the way, that Marx’s transition to political economics and to revolutionary activity must not be understood either as an abandonment of philosophy or as a mere application of it – in the sense of applying a philosophy that contains in itself its criterion of truth. We also understand the meaning of another formula that is often used: the Marxist identification of philosophy and political ideology (“philosophy is always the philosophy of a party”). This process of identification is quite simple, actually. The distinction between the two makes sense if one defines philosophy as the consideration of the eternal categories of being, and ideology as a means to act in the present. But Marx’s philosophy cannot but replace the categories of the eternal and the contingent with those of the past and the future. However, we must avoid giving this identity a vulgar interpretation. Because, certainly, not only would it be a vulgarity to say that Hegel constructed his philosophy to serve the interests of

15 Clearly, this is what determines the sharp distinction between Marxist materialism and metaphysical materialism. One cannot speak of matter as substance if thought does not represent essences. “Matter” and “spirit” are thus reduced to working hypotheses. Not having understood this issue explains why many Marxists, Engels first of all, viewed Marxist materialism as a form of metaphysical materialism. However, it is also true that the theory of language, which is a corollary (even if it is not highlighted explicitly) of this theory of thought, enables Marxism to have a plurality of formulations, provided that they designate the same practical operations. In light of this, it is hard to judge whether Engels really departed from Marxist thought or whether he simply carried out a translation of it suitable to a determined cultural milieu. Another consequence of this failure to understand are the numerous remarks by revisionist critics about the lack of rigour of Marxist language, about the word “materialism,” which must not be taken literally, and so forth.

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the Prussian state, or Croce those of Southern Italian landowners, but also to simply say that in the philosophies of Hegel or Croce we hear the voice of a Prussian conservative or a Southern Italian landowner. At most, one can say that their philosophical research was halted by their practical situation. It is evident that speculative thought does not intentionally aim at being an ideology: on the contrary, it takes every care to avoid being one, falling into “tendentious philosophy.” What Marx says is that decadence into reactionary ideology is an inevitable consequence of speculative thought and annihilates its value as philosophy. This annihilation happens because, by closing the real, by means of the mystification I mentioned above, speculative thought negates itself in terms of what it intends to be – that is, thought of the eternal categories of the real. The involuntariness of this decadence into ideology reveals speculative philosophy to be the ideology of a historical reality that it does not contribute to building. Therefore it is in the essence of speculative philosophy to become the instrument of historical forces it does not create. In short, whereas for speculative philosophy becoming ideology is the sign of its limitation, conversely revolutionary ideology resolves philosophy into itself because, by breaking the closure of being, it expresses the direction of the real as self-realizing totality and the constitutive principle of the new form of reality. Nonetheless it may seem that an objection is still possible on the part of the Christian-Marxist: “We can even grant that this has been the real process of Marx’s thought; but this does not prevent scientific reason, once it has been accepted, from acquiring its own autonomy and being able in turn to act back on the philosophical presuppositions that originally made people resort to it, and thus from bringing about the transformation of Marxism we described.” In this regard, we still have to clarify how Marxist political practice, too, becomes intelligible only in reference to the fundamental critique of human nature (how it is, essentially, the experimental verification of this hypothesis); and how, apart from this reference, the appearance of a contradictory combination of the purest iusnaturalism with the most brazen political realism is insuperable. That is, the thesis that has been the occasion for so many literary and journalistic polemics (Köstler, the various memoirs by disappointed people, etc.) is insuperable; and its fortune is understandable, given how it matches the appearances. However, if we want to shift to a different level, let us consider what is peculiar and truly historically unique in the Marxist ethical-political position: the radical elimination of the question

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of means without implying a separation (not even in the sense of a simple distinction) of ethics and politics. Clearly, this apparent contradiction can vanish only in light of the Marxist theses I recalled earlier. The moral question of means – that is, the question of persuasion and violence – exists only if we recognize that there is an essential man prior to the existing man. In other words, this question is internal to the anthropology that we could call, in the broadest sense, Hellenic-Christian. Therefore, it cannot be carried into the anthropology that intends to be such anthropology’s rigorous critique. Indeed, in Christian anthropology, in a broad sense, social change will be a consequence of man’s moral change (of his conversion, as the reawakening in him of the idea of God, and of its secular translations from “common human nature” to Feuerbach’s thesis about love).16 Conversely, in the Marxist position man’s change can only come about as a consequence of social change, of the creation of the new society that will be simultaneously the creation of a new man. But does the elimination of the question of means imply the outright elimination of ethics, pure politicism? For sure, it implies the total negation of traditional ethics. However, not the pure and simple negation of ethics: ethics is rediscovered as included in politics, and this because of the constitutive and necessary character of the relationship between each single individual and the others (see the Marxist idea of the total man). This constitutive character of my relationship with other people has the effect that willing my own freedom implies willing the freedom of all. Of course, the moral task will presents itself to me not as Sollen but as Müssen. In other words, it is not the case that the liberation of others will present itself to me as a moral duty against the resistance of my instincts. It is a moment of my own liberation since the relationship with society is constitutive of my nature; the volition of the universal (and in Marxism universality can only mean sociality) is included in the volition of the individual; the moral aspect, to use the usual terminology, is included in the economic aspect. Then, the critique of Christian-Marxism seems very easy indeed. If, in fact, Marxist scientific reason does not stand by itself, so to speak, but expresses the recourse to experimental verification that is required 16 Regarding the connections in Feuerbach between religious atheism (the “atheist solution to the question of God” instead of the “disappearance of the question of God”), the concept of human nature, and the theory of love, see the remarks by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy.

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by the reduction of philosophical concepts to working hypotheses; if this reduction, in turn, is based on the critique of every transcendence of the human being with respect to his historical determination; if every aspect of the Marxist political praxis is not intelligible except in relation to this critique; then it is evident that the notion of a possible qualitative leap internal to Marxism is nonsense. In fact, the qualitative leap would determine a modification of the working hypothesis, in the sense that the non-essential aspect of Marxism, metaphysicalism, would be eliminated; but, if the working hypothesis is precisely the idea of “social man” in the sense I explained, it is clear that a possible contradiction by historical reality will mark not the need for a development but, rather, the end of Marxism.

3. CHRISTIANITY AND MARXISM Yet, this critique leaves us with an undeniable feeling of dissatisfaction. Not only because of the psychological and moral difficulties that the leftist Christian experience may reveal, with respect to which a logical critique is fruitless, but also in the much more important sense that this experience may point to a very important truth that, however, it has not adequately expressed. In fact, this thought seems to be suggested by the widespread sentiment that the actual relationship between Christianity and Marxism is more complex than the usual ways of articulating it – either as pure antithesis, or Marxism as a partial social truth distorted by a false philosophy or, finally, Marxism as the gravedigger of sinful modern civilization (a view that reproduces, after all, a scheme that Catholics commonly apply to every new trend of thought: Romanticism, Idealism, etc.). Therefore, now I would like to consider not how this experience may present itself and develop according to my view but, rather, how it must do so by its internal necessity, once the contradiction of Christian-Marxism has been recognized. Let us start from the historical contradiction that, in Balbo’s judgment, makes necessary the qualitative leap: “as long as denying the unverified working hypothesis means for him to simultaneously deny God, man has essential motives to refuse to give up the ‘fetish.’ These are motives that man cannot suppress without suppressing himself as a real man, given that the foundation of religion is real and meta-­ historical, because it is man’s very being … wars of religion are also

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historical signs of men’s consciousness-of and will-to being.”17 Or equivalently: Marxism-Leninism in its orthodox form demands, besides a historical political judgment, a truth judgment, without being able to give, in regard to Christianity, the element that would support it. Let us now discuss what can be the meaning of this objection. First of all, what has already been said makes clear that Marxism cannot conduct its criticism of Christianity based on the evidence of its principles. It can only base it on the fact that Christianity is “historically exhausted.” But clearly this argument, taken in the usual empirical sense – namely, the appearance that Christianity is exhausted because in today’s world it fails to be for those who profess themselves Christian the principle of their life in history – is not rigorous. Because what we are talking about in this case is the recognition of the exhaustion of a determined historical ideal (e.g., the theocratic ideal, or the type of dualistic Christianity), which is arbitrarily fixed to be the absolute practical ideal of Christianity, without taking into account that the transcendence and supra-historicity of Christian principles forbids that any absolute historical ideal be derived from them. Faithfulness to suprahistorical principles can only be creative faithfulness, which creates ever new solutions to the ever new problems that historical experience presents. The fact that in certain periods this creative faithfulness may be lacking, that the “Christian world” may experience declines and crises, is completely irrelevant, rigorously speaking, with respect to the truth or not of Christianity. In reality, Marx undoubtedly thought that the critique of Christianity was implicit in the critique of Hegelianism: Hegel’s philosophy is the conclusion in which “nothing has been lost” of two millennia of thought; reckoning with Hegel is the same as reckoning with all of the past. However, if we look carefully, in Marx the relationship with Hegel takes place in two different ways, even though a clear awareness of the implications of this difference is lacking. According to the first way, which is very clear in the doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, the Hegelian position constitutes a logically antecedent and conditioning stage with respect to the Marxist position. That is, Marx wonders how it will be possible to take a step forward after, in Hegel, philosophy has made

17 Balbo, “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” 111 and 121.

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itself total. It cannot happen as a linear extension, as a partial reform: by necessity it will have to be a radical inversion. But what form shall this inversion take? In Hegel the world made itself philosophy; after Hegel philosophy must make itself the world and, therefore, be in a position of radical negation with respect to the world that Hegel justified (therefore the realization of philosophy will coincide with its “loss” because the becoming world of philosophy will be at the same time the liberation of the world from philosophy). The total reconciliation of philosophy with reality can only be followed by an absolute break, and the philosophy that turns towards the world will be a philosophy of praxis. “It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, and … turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it … When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appearance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it has become one aspect of the world which opposes another aspect … The inner self-contentment and completeness has been broken. What was inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards.”18 This is the initial position, the program of young Marx. It is also his initial “Hegelian orthodoxy” because it seems that, after all, Marx’s transformation from Hegelian to Marxist, in this first stage of his thought, is demanded by Hegel. But if we move on from the program to its execution, to the necessary break, that is, with Hegelian orthodoxy, this first form of relation is replaced by an entirely different one. Hegelianism and Marxism no longer look like successive moments but, rather, like different solutions of the same problem, one “mystified” and the other rigorous. The consequences of this change of perspective are very significant. According to the first point of view Hegelianism can still appear to be the philosophy in which “nothing has been lost,” Christianity that has reached its philosophical awareness and thus its sunset; the subsequent Marxist anti-Christianity is justified by Hegel himself. According to the second, on the contrary, the contradiction of Hegel’s philosophy manifests the contradiction between rationalism and Christianity. Rationalism pushed to the extreme must conclude not in “Christian philosophy,” in Christianity resolved into philosophy and therein surpassed and 18 Karl Marx, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010) , 85.

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preserved, but in anti-Christianity. Now, it becomes very hard to understand how, after abandoning the first point of view, Marxism can still conduct its polemics against Christianity at the level of truth. From a historicist standpoint, Marxism can present itself as truth with respect to Christianity only in as much as it surpasses it, annihilates it in the act of preserving it. But there is no way in which the relation of Marxism to Christianity can be regarded as surpassing-preserving. The only moment they may seem to have in common is the equal dignity of every human person. However, it takes a completely different meaning not because in Marxism it is transvalued as a consequence of being inserted into a new organism of thought but, rather, because the process of thought through which it is reached in Marxism (based on the interdependence of freedoms, so that the freedom of all becomes the condition for my freedom) presupposes the previous negation of the process through which it is reached in Christianity (based on the presence in every man of the image of God). This difficulty in the historicist position can somehow clarify the ideal origin and the endurance of the naturalistic and scientistic form of Marxism – dialectical materialism. Certainly it is the faithful (in as much as it implies the same practical consequences), but logically not very defensible, transcription of Marxism on the plane of the philosophy of comprehension; and statements about its inadequacy, about the distinction between Engelism and Marxism, and so on, today are fairly common.19 I am not going to say they are not true, but I think that not to consider what is unsatisfactory in their explanation of the genesis of this position is not right either. Why did Marx offer no resistance to Engels’s transcription, and why did he let people think that it adequately expressed his philosophy? Does this not raise the question of whether it was necessary for Marxism to shift the fight to the level of scientism because the level of historicism had proven itself inadequate? Explaining Marxism in terms of the “Hegelian orthodoxy” is certainly an incorrect line of interpretation. Nonetheless, it seems to me that, without an implicit, and certainly unjustified and contradictory, reference to it in the sense I described, Marxism cannot think of itself as truth. If we take this criticism as agreed upon, and we try to think Marxism without this reference, it seems to be initially conditioned by

19 See, for example, my previous essay, “Marx’s non-Philosophy.”

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a gratuitous negation of ontological possibilities. Let us see what this can mean. We saw already that Marxism presents itself with respect to Hegelianism as absolute rationalism; it is in a certain way what Hegelianism meant to be, the final outcome of rationalism. The possible question is now whether rationalism, having reached its outcome, does not undergo an inversion and confess that its original postulate was arbitrary. At this point, we ought to specify the content of the word “rationalism,” which we have used without explicitly defining it. Naturally, I will do so just in a problematic form, as a mere outline of a research program, to which I am constricted by the limitations of this work. In its most general sense, the rationalist attitude is nothing but the simple assumption that man’s present condition is its normal condition. This attitude coincides with the moral devaluation of miracles (in the broadest sense of this word, so that it also coincides with the negation of free creation, of the theme of sin in its biblical meaning and so on – consider Hegel’s statement that a miracle is a “violation of the spirit”). But in what sense can this assumption be said to have been proved? That is, in what sense is the negation of the supernatural that it implies not just an a priori? The ideal of metaphysical rationalism is the ideal of “comprehension”: man attains his freedom by adopting the standpoint of being considered in its totality, by elevating himself through thought to such a level of universality that his existence in finite life becomes to him a matter of indifference (and a thousand equivalent formulas). The ideal of philosophy, in other words, is to understand myself as an object in the world of objects or, if you wish, the reduction of the individual to the empirical I. This is why the philosophy of comprehension moves towards Idealism, as the dissolution, in thought, of the reality of the finite (and it is worth recalling Hegel’s famous definition: “the proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The Idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being.”20 Incidentally, this definition enables us to see that the dispute between realism and Idealism becomes utterly meaningless if it is moved onto the purely gnoseological level). Clearly, in this position the religious attitude, in as much as it is concerned with individual salvation, must appear to be the mythological form of the

20 [TN] Georg W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, §316.

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elevation to the universal: religion is philosophia inferior. But, on the other hand, the truth that becomes manifested to the metaphysical rationalist is a truth mediated by an ethical attitude (this duty to “elevate oneself to the universal”). Hence, the hiatus that necessarily opens up in every metaphysical rationalism between truth and reality, and its consequences: the pendulum-like swings in the history of philosophy between rationalism and anti-rationalist forms, which, however, do not touch rationalism’s initial presupposition but stand up for forms of reality that have been sacrificed by this or that rationalist synthesis; also the appearance, among them, of forms of spiritualist eclecticism, attempts to reintroduce the religious form (as a mere “form of the spirit”) in order to bridge the hiatus between truth and reality (the “reasons of the heart,” “practical reason,” etc.); and, throughout history, the continuous effort of rationalism to reach the concrete. But, about what concerns us here: we may wonder whether the ethical attitude that conditions metaphysical rationalisms may not be, in turn, conditioned by a previous thesis about the negativity of the finite or the ontological reality of guilt; by the thesis that death is the destiny of finite being or that man is “guilty by the very fact of existing” – that is, by an interpretation of sin that is a direct consequence of the assumption that man’s present condition is normal. Thus, we may wonder whether the negation of the supernatural and the reduction of religion to philosophia inferior actually just “make clear” an unproven initial presupposition (whether they are definitions that are internal to an “attitude,” to a “type” that has been “chosen”). We have already seen in broad outline how the transition into historicist rationalism took place through an internal necessity of rationalism21 – because of the twofold contradiction in metaphysical rationalism between the intention to atheologize the finite and the theologization of the finite constituted by the system; and between the system and reality because of the above- mentioned hiatus between truth and reality. The critique I just formulated – regarding Marxism’s difficulty in

21 Here, of course, a further question should arise concerning whether Marxism can be regarded as the rigorous form of historicism – that is, the “Croce versus Marx” question. I will just briefly mention my own view: Croce’s historicism seems to me the projection (the only possible one) of historicism on the plane of the philosophy of comprehension. We can find a first confirmation of this in the fact that Croce needs, in order to beat Marxism (or its shadow), to re-translate it precisely onto this plane where, obviously, it is self-contradictory.

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conducting the criticism of Christianity at the level of truth, while the anti-Christianity of Marxist anthropology and ethics requires the affirmation that Christianity is not true, and there is no room for an agnostic position – now raises the question of whether the historical process of rationalism may not be circular and, in its final moment, may not end up making clear the initial negation of ontological possibilities it postulated. In other words, of whether Marxism represents the outcome of rationalism and is therefore not only an insuperable position within the circle of rationalism but also represents its self-criticism. But, at this point, it becomes clear that, even if we abandon the Christian-Marxist delusion, the value of Balbo’s thesis remains intact: Marxism opens up the possibility of a non-mystified investigation of the question of being, the way to non-mystified religious work. It forces Christian thought to re-express itself with formulas that are no longer mystified. It forces Christian thought, in other words, to a correlative self-criticism even in the strictly philosophical field. Because the notion that rationalism is “philosophy” tout court is, we can say, the “natural” conviction of the human spirit. It is no wonder, then, that the rationalist spirit/temptation constantly penetrates Christian thought. This penetration takes place in the guise of accepting the two typical figures of metaphysical rationalism, the beginning (which actually denotes the logical-ethical ascesis that is necessary in order for the philosopher to forget himself and to come to understand himself as an object in the world of objects) and the system (finished reality, with the consequent eternalization of a historical set of questions, and what that also implies at the political level – elevating a determined historical ideal of Christian politics to absolute ideal).

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IV

Notes on Western Irreligion (1963)

1 . A t h e i s m o r “ N at u r a l I r r e l i g i o n ” ? If we turn our attention to the Western world, we may be led to doubt that the statement that atheism is the primary datum of historical actuality truly expresses the factual situation.1 Because we may wonder whether

1 About the concept of historical actuality, see the definition by Fr G. Fessard, De l’actualité historique, vol. 1 (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1960), 10–11. “Thanks to their being paradoxically united, the two terms tend to span no less than the whole range of questions posed to each and every one of us by the fact that we are essentially historical beings, such that our reality (individual as well as social) takes shape gradually, step by step and according to the free decisions that we make in every occasion, in the most fleeting hic et nunc. Having to conjoin, each of these two terms loses its trivial meaning thanks to the other, and thus awakens the need for the total meaning, which alone is capable of satisfying our will to be, and to be in the full light of intelligibility. In order to clarify the origin and the scope of this need, we must then resort to a method capable of considering every problem and every event according to its historical actuality. This requires a double, converging investigation. First of all, reflection must try to grasp the historical element, both in its own essence and in its relationships with other dimensions of being that are more familiar to a theologian or a philosopher, such as the natural, rational, supernatural dimensions etc. Then, in light of this apprehension, it still has to seek the resolution of the antinomies he met, by means of a hierarchy of values based precisely on the relationship between these various dimensions of being and historical actuality.” By the same author and on the same concept, see La Dialectique des Exercises spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris: Aubier, 1956), 16–17. This is also the method that I have essentially tried to follow in the present essay.

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the “pressing reality”2 of the last twenty years (the “world of yesterday” extended past 1940) has been the spreading of something entirely different from atheism – namely, “natural irreligion” (the loss, the eclipse of the sacred, or whatever else we want to call it).3 In order to show that they are essentially different phenomena, I am forced to anticipate here a thesis that will be highlighted in the next essay. In my judgment, after Christianity, the categories of two essential philosophical forms, Christian thought and rationalism, are conditioned by an initial stance with respect to the Fall. Now, there is a third form of thought that claims to constitute itself regardless of such choice: empiricism, which is essentially specified by the distinction between the verifiable and the unverifiable.4 Supposedly, by virtue of this distinction, not only knowledge but also morals and politics are able to organize themselves independently of any “hypothesis” about supra-sensitive reality. Thus, whereas atheism always includes a mystical moment,5 albeit of mysticism in reverse, empiricism is characterized by the abandonment of every mysticism; whereas atheism displays in some respects

2 This term was used by A. Muñoz Alonso in his introductory presentation, El fenomeno del ateismo, at the Gallarate Conference of 1961. It was published in the volume Il problema dell’ateismo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962) [TN: the conference proceedings happen to have the same title as the present volume]. 3 By the expression “natural irreligion” I mean exactly the opposite of the “natural religion” of the seventeenth century (e.g., Campanella’s religio abdita). This fits within the idea, to which I will return again later, that today’s irreligious thought is the complete inversion of the religious thought of the seventeenth century. 4 We must also observe that empiricism parts ways with rationalism in as much as it eliminates the theme of the pari, which in rationalism is instead implicit and manifests itself, as we shall see, in its final form. In this regard, we could study the relationship between Descartes and Locke to show that, in the latter, we find the elimination, even without a clear intention or awareness, of all the Cartesian themes that can lead to Pascal’s position. The distinction between verifiable and unverifiable is also essential to existentialism, but for existentialism (at least in its religious forms) what has value is the unverifiable, whereas empiricism accentuates the verifiable. Therefore, existentialism represents a much more radical critique of rationalism, and here we should raise the question of explaining why empiricism is subordinate to rationalism in its entire historical development. Thus, the ultimate development of rationalism into atheism is paralleled in empiricism by the loss of the sacred. 5 Regarding the mystical character of atheism, see, for example, Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (Stuttgard and Berlin: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1922). The literature about the religious character of Communism is huge.

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gnostic aspects,6 empiricism is constitutionally agnostic. Now, natural irreligion represents precisely this agnostic attitude pushed to the extreme. Whence we can also reach the following thesis: the present moment is when the two traditional lines of modern philosophy, rationalism and empiricism, arrive at their ultimate consequences, erasing all attempts at conciliation with religion. The outlook of natural irreligion says: it is not a matter of denying that there are open questions, which cannot be solved by the ordinary means of knowledge; but such unsolvable questions are also those that do not interest us; meaning that they do not interest those who want to act in the world in order to improve it in any sense, be it technical, aesthetic, practical-social – as opposed to those who seek an escapist transcendence. The difference between the current natural irreligion and old-style agnosticism can be discerned in these words by Ayer:7

6 The origin of the Hegelian term “alienation,” which Marx picked up, is gnostic and not at all iusnaturalistic as is commonly believed. In particular, we can say that Marxism reproduces in different terms the scheme of Manichean Gnosis as described by a recent interpreter (Claude Tresmontant, Etudes de métaphysique biblique [Paris: Gabalda, 1955], 250): “The ensuing peace is not identical to the primitive peace. In the epoch that preceded the Fall, temptation remained possible. Whereas by now the Absolute is no longer tempted to alienate itself. It has achieved, thanks to its odyssey, eternal fullness and security.” To have the Marxist vision of history, it will be enough to add that primitive peace is that of primitive Communism, and to replace the absolute with the Community that characterizes the final age – which is the very being of man become aware of all his possibilities of development. In fact, the idea that the philosophies of history of the nineteenth century, of which Marxism is the endpoint, have a gnostic character is part of the common culture. Actually, Tresmontant tends to refer the rediscovery of Gnosticism to Hegel alone and to view Marxism as a process of liberation from it and a return to biblical metaphysics. But, in fact, if we accept the analogy, we should rather view it as the moment in the history of thought when Gnosticism dissociated itself from Platonism and, simultaneously, the heterogeneity between Gnosticism and biblical thought manifested itself most clearly. 7 Generally, the word “agnosticism” is used in a pejorative sense. People think of Spencer, of an unknowable caput mortuum, and so on. Actually, if it is placed in the context of its time, and especially in the last decade of the nineteenth century when criticizing materialism seemed to be the obligatory theme for philosophy professors, agnosticism represents the effort to find a third way, beyond the metaphysical absolutisms of Idealism and materialism. Just as the sciences achieved a positive level when they related to religion from a position of neutrality and did not claim to originate new faiths, so must philosophy. Let us not forget that the phenomenology of the early Husserl, with its suspension of judgment about existence, arose in this climate. And

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“For if the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.”8 Old agnosticism affirmed that we are not equipped to decide which of the two propositions “there is a transcendent God” and “there is not a transcendent God” is true. But it hinted that the truth of the first proposition was preferable, and it professed that asking the question of God was an inescapable necessity for the human mind. Conversely, for today’s irreligion the exact opposite is true: there is no reason to raise the question of God because the affirmation of his existence is logically meaningless. Furthermore, even shifting the question to practice is not allowed because, with respect to social questions, asking the question of God would be, people think, disastrous. They say: democratic politics can only be de-mythologized politics, which keeps rigorously to the temporal sphere. If anybody today insists on shifting the attention to the theological aspect of contemporary politics, he is just proposing to ­walk backwards the path that all of culture, and not just Western culture, has followed over the last forty years. Indeed, what was Stalinism if not the attempt to sacralize politics to the highest degree? And where else could the forms that paralleled the triumph of Stalinism in Russia, Fascism, and Nazism have blossomed if not in cultural climates saturated with the sacredness of politics and with political theology?9 Spirit of perhaps it would not be a stretch to present the philosophy of the early Husserl as that of a thinker who, in order to give agnosticism a truly rigorous meaning, found himself forced to give up not only Spencer but also Kant. 8 Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (London: Gollancz, 1946), 115. Since in a moment I will mention the present relevance of Comte, it may be useful to compare some of his sentences with those of Ayer: “Atheism, even from the intellectual point of view, is a very imperfect form of emancipation; for its tendency is to prolong the metaphysical stage indefinitely, by continuing to seek for new solutions of Theological problems, instead of setting aside all inaccessible researches on the ground of their utter inutility … As long as men persist in attempting to answer the insoluble questions which occupied the attention of the childhood of our race, by far the more rational plan is to do as was done then, that is, simply to give free play to the imagination … Persistent Atheists, therefore, would seem to be the most illogical of theologists; because they occupy themselves with theological problems, and yet reject the only appropriate method of handling them.” See Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1875), 36–7. 9 Think, for example, in Italy of the religiosity of politics in Gentile, or in Germany of the works of Carl Schmitt.

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intolerance, of crusade, or of bloody revolution: supposedly these are the consequences of introducing theological themes into political and social questions. From the psycho-pedagogical perspective, how could we not mention, very briefly, psychoanalysis in its most common meaning? Man’s “liberation” means liberation from his psychical imbalances. And the idea of God, which was born from the child’s sense of fear of his real father, holds man back in an infantile stage, which cannot be harmonized with his growth and with real problems. According to a certain type of neo-positivism, it is a matter of banishing all references to theism or atheism from every judgment, theoretical as well as practical: soon the “useless question” will be forgotten; the inexorable process of growth will fatally lead to the euthanasia of religion. It has been said that Auguste Comte’s philosophical enterprise was to seek a man “without any trace of God.”10 As we can see, old Comte – whose power of thought certainly must not be underestimated, and who actually must be regarded not only as the greatest among the old positivists but also as one of the most vigorous thinkers of the nineteenth century – is not far, even though his most recent heirs also intend to erase his “Religion of Humanity.” Let us observe that natural irreligion indicates a higher level of impiousness than atheism in as much as it rejects the very idea of religion. Even if it is rigorously atheistic, even if it denies every revelation and every supernatural reality, Marxism, in its Communist version, is indeed a religion in which the Future replaces the Eternal, and Totality replaces the Absolute and the City of God. The process of conversion from the atheistic to the theistic religion (or vice versa) is certainly possible, whereas it is blocked by natural irreligion. From the standpoint of history, its novel character can hardly be emphasized enough. One cannot establish any connection between its pressing reality and the atheistic invasion that took place in France during the first decades of the seventeenth century because then atheism presented itself as an aristocratic phenomenon in opposition to the “natural religion” of the people (the attitude essentially of contempt displayed by the greatest libertine

10 H. Gouhier, La jeunesse de Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, 1933), 23.

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erudite, Naudé, towards Campanella is paradigmatic).11 Today, instead, at the historical-social level natural irreligion is a mass phenomenon, and at the ideal level it is a sort of a priori form that prevents the reception of transcendent religion as well as atheism since the latter still keeps in its own way the idea of the “sacred.” It also marks the difference between the first and the second postwar periods. The first was the time of the transfer of the sacred to the immanent; this transfer to the immanent, realizing itself in collective form, took the form of secular religion, to use a term that was widely circulated.12 The second, instead, is the time of its loss. Does this mean that the present time seems to mark an ever greater victory of democracy and a decline of totalitarianism, even in places where it seemed to have established itself most firmly? In a certain sense, yes, but it is a democracy associated with a particular moral attitude. By this I certainly do not mean to say that the terms “democracy” and “irreligion” are correlated but only that there is also a type of democracy that is tightly linked with the loss of the sacred and that this is precisely what today’s democraticism seems to me. Paradoxically, the disappearance of the question of God, which, according to Marxism, should have followed the proletarian revolution, today seems to be taking place at the final stage of bourgeois society. Now, what are the origins of this new mentality? They do not seem to be directly philosophical, which might lead one to think that a truly rigorous investigation should begin by examining the social background. This would lead us to discover a new social and historical reality that seeks its own philosophy and, in part, has already found it, at least in a negative sense – a phenomenon that takes shape reflecting the influences to which the individual is exposed by the fact of living in a determined society. 11 As concerns France, the origins of the word “atheism” have been highlighted by H. Busson, La pensée religieuse française de Charron à Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1933), 15–16. The word is first mentioned in a text of 1543, but it does not become common (and is used mostly by its adversaries) until the first decades of the 1600s. 12 Regarding this déplacement de sacré, see the very remarkable work by Jules Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). However, today that book looks aged because the situation has changed since the time of its writing, when it really might seem that the second postwar period was the fulfilment of the first; a change to which seemingly Communism itself has had to adapt. But the most serious defect is the inadequate awareness of the importance of the philosophical aspect in the development he describes.

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Of course, in natural irreligion the thoughts of the ancient atheists, of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche (for this mindset “ancient” means the nineteenth century), return but without their tragic or revolutionary meaning. Thus, “God is dead” takes a rather different meaning from the Nietzschean sacramental assassination. It ends up meaning, instead: God was a natural idea in ages when there was a particular relationship between man and nature. At that time he lived in the only place where he can live, in men’s hearts. Today this idea has ceased to be, precisely in connection with a changed relationship. Religion was alive when it performed a human function, and at that time it was impervious to all criticisms of a logical kind; today this human function has ended, and all that is left is the myth, which is unverifiable and logically irrelevant; and there is a multiplication of attempts by theologians to “de-­ mythologize” it, attempts that do not persuade believers and that leave unbelievers utterly indifferent. The notion will disappear once the technical domination by man over nature is perfectly realized, when the attribute of being creator will have been completely transferred into man’s hands. The focus shifts to ethnological studies, and the reason is quite clear. What people want to understand about these religious phenomena that have lorded over man’s soul for so long is their genesis, out of conviction that the study of the origins resolves in itself the meaning of the value. The rejection of the idea of God will result from the history of its origins. A whole literature is taking shape that reminds us of the ancient “horoscope of religions.” There is very little to say on this matter since these are mental habits that were already common during the formative period of the Enlightenment (in order to understand their nature, studying Fontenelle would suffice). The focus shifts to genetic psychology, and the same comments apply. It shifts to sociologism as a doctrine of absolute relativism. In sum, it shifts to psychology and sociology as disciplines that will account for religions and metaphysics by investigating their origins. Thus, historicism of the romantic type is replaced by historicism of the enlightened and libertine type. Historicism that justified tradition is replaced by historicism that dissolves it. Those who chase the “spirit of the times” will say that absolute liberation from Romanticism is the task of today’s culture. Thus, it would appear that in any case a sociological study of contemporary irreligion should be primary. Now, the task of this essay is precisely to argue the opposite thesis: meaning that, at the bottom of the features displayed today by the Western world there is an ideal and properly

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philosophical causality, of which contemporary natural irreligion is just a consequence. And our attention must turn to this properly philosophical atheism; the sociological investigation will be correct only if comes after a strictly philosophical initial analysis. Therefore, let us start from the commonly accepted thesis that there is a direct relationship between progress of technology and increase of irreligion.13 Technology14 brings about the loss of the traditional notion of otium;15 technology abolishes sacred time; technology replaces the concern for being with that for doing; technology, by focusing attention on the efficacy of the visible outcome, leads to regarding the extroverted disposition as the only normal one and, thus, to considering abnormal the injunction noli foras te ire and all the themes of thought that echo it; technology leads to the idea of a second innocence, of a complete reconciliation (mediated by technology itself) between man and nature; and so on and so forth. Hence, the collapse is due to the mere advancement of the technological mindset, to the reason of the times, and not to the elucubrations of philosophers, of culture, of piety, of metaphysics, of the theory of knowledge, of ethics (by the replacement of the intention by the result), of theology, traditionally considered to be Christian. Furthermore, this process appears to be irreversible because the progress of technology is the progress of science, and the progress of science is the progress of intelligence. These ideas would lead religious thought to a catastrophic vision. Because if this were true, the only attitude that could be expected today from a man of thought would the awareness of catastrophicity. In the vision I described there are some undoubted elements of truth, which need to be highlighted in order to insert them into another, more rigorous vision. Indeed, the usual terms, so common in Catholic literature – “pride,” “resignation,” “despair,” “pessimism” – caused by the spectacle of evil and suffering do not apply to the new form of irreligion. 13 See, for example, S. Acquaviva, L’eclissi del sacro nella civiltà industriale (Milan: Edizioni di comunità, 1961). 14 [TN] Here, and in the rest of the sentence, Del Noce uses tecnica, not tecnologia. The two words are roughly equivalent, but tecnologia is more general and abstract. I did not translate tecnica as “technique” because in English this word is typically used to indicate one specific technical procedure. 15 About the classical notion of otium see the splendid essay by J. Pieper, “Otium” e culto (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1956) [Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. A. Dru (London: Faber and Faber, 1952)].

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At its foundation there is, instead, the impression that the idea of God is useless with regard to our decision to come together to build our life, individual as well as social; that Christian science, philosophy, morality, and politics today have nothing left to tell us, even though in other times they spoke. There is not even mere indifference, in the ancient sense of this word, because indifference presupposed the idea of a single morality valid for all men, such that, if we follow it, we will be happy doing good for good’s sake; about what will happen to us after death, we do not care. We can say that the new attitude is before anything else, and only, trust in technology and overcoming all nostalgia for the past by accepting the technical world; and it is trust in progress as a consequence of trust in technology. Since I recalled Comte, it is worth pointing out the difference because it marks our time’s specific character. According to Comte, the process (the ideal of a new religious unification of mankind) was progress-science-technology; the current process is rather technology-science-progress, and the latter idea is completely freed from any aspect leading to a religion of Humanity as a surrogate for traditional religion. How do the idea of technology and the idea of progress meet each other? Simply because the two ideas are correlated: the idea of progress is valid only in the field of science and technology, and only in there does it find its confirmation. And it is not by chance that it really arose – as distinct from other earlier ideas (prophetism, messianism, millennialism, or even the theological view of history) or other later ones (the idea of revolution) – in the atmosphere of the new science, despite what some people have said.16 Thus, it is natural that the extension of the technological mindset goes hand in hand with the extension of the idea of progress, the 16 After saying in his Cours de Philosophie positive, vol. 5 (Paris: Baillière, 1877), 172, that “the conception of progress belongs exclusively to the positive philosophy,” Comte adds: “it is certain that Pascal was animated by a sense of the progress of the sciences when he uttered the immortal aphorism: ‘the entire succession of men, through the whole course of ages, must be regarded as one man, always living and incessantly learning’” [The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 2, ed. and trans. H. Martineau (London: John Chapman, 1853), 54]. His view is essentially correct. In fact (and here we could no longer follow Comte), Pascal has defined in an insuperable way the scope of the idea of progress, as a concept that can be applied only to the sciences, exact and experimental, and that is not transferable to other fields of spiritual activity.

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greatest it has experienced so far. Indeed, what value is left to the classical objection that there cannot be moral progress – because of the intrinsic, result-independent, irrevocable value of every act, and because of the rarity of truly moral acts – if, according to the pan-technicist mindset, there is no other measure of the value of an act than, precisely, its result, or, as people say, the expansion, promotion, and rationalization of life? The words of Nietzsche, the anti-progressive, are completely accepted as the criterion for a history of morality: “There is a continual moiling and toiling going on in morality – the effect of successful crimes (among which, for example, are included all innovations in moral thinking).”17 Moreover, in this extension the idea of progress fully realizes a characteristic that it had been acquiring in the course of its history, that of becoming an irreligious solution to the question of evil, a postulate opposed to that of sin. In fact, as long as one operates in the context of the traditional contradiction between the existence of a sovereignly good God and the presence of evil in the world – an objection that has almost disappeared from recent philosophical literature because it was based on the metaphysical type of rationalism and led to two solutions: either a dialectical explanation of evil, in a conception that looked at the Whole, or metaphysical dualism in a conception that looked at the individuals – the theologian ultimately wins the argument because the most direct and immediate proof of the existence of God lies in the need for him prompted by the experience of evil and suffering.18 In that case, a sort of conflict gets established between reality 17 [TN] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59. 18 Here, a well-known passage by Rousseau from La Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard, ed. P.-M. Masson (Fribourg-Paris: Librairie de l’université-Librairie Hachette, 1914), 201–7, is worth quoting: “in the present state of things … the wicked triumph and the just are trampled on and oppressed. What indignation, hence, arises within us to find that our hopes are frustrated! Conscience itself rises up and complains of its maker. It cries out to him, lamenting, thou hast deceived me! ‘I have deceived thee! rash man? Who hath told thee so? Is thy soul annihilated? Dost thou cease to exist?’ … If the soul be immaterial, it may survive the body, and if so, Providence is justified. Had I no other proof of the immateriality of the soul, than the oppression of the just and the triumph of the wicked in this world, this alone would prevent my having the least doubt of it. So shocking a discord amidst the general harmony of things, would make me naturally look out for the cause. I should say to myself, we do not cease to exist with this life, – every thing resumes its order after death” [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar (New York: Eckler,

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(the need for God) and abstract rationality, and the former necessarily prevails: indeed, examining the contradiction when it is posed in these terms leads to a critique of rationalism, understood here in its simplest sense, of which Pascal was speaking when he recognized it in the idea that human reason is “above everything.” In order to reaffirm his position, the irreligious objector finds himself forced to adjust his aim and shift to the practical standpoint: disorder can truly be eliminated from the world and not by the action of a transcendent or immanent rationality (of providence however understood), but by an action that is our action. This has the necessary corollary that such progress, precisely because it depends on nothing but our action, does not present itself as ineluctable and necessary. Therefore, today’s progressivism rediscovers the Enlightenment’s formulation of the doctrine of progress, freed from the influences that had been exerted by the romantic philosophy of history.19 Progress can triumph if we want it – that is, if the advancement of science and of its applications is not blocked by the forces that oppose the rationalization of the world; in practice, by the resentment of the social classes that are inimical to the movement of history, the decadent classes that, not by chance, always speak in the name of absolute truths. Therefore, the stance of breaking with tradition and the agonistic dualization of rational versus irrational, accompanied by the denunciation of the irrational elements the world has displayed until now, are intrinsic to the progressive attitude. But, on the other hand, the idea of progress has lost the ethical and humanitarian character that went with it in the 1800s (so that it meant, for instance in Proudhon and in so many others, “the advent of justice”). Even when the old terminology is used, the meaning is different: being progressive today means being up to date with a possible development of intelligence, which leads to full technical rationalization. I must add, very briefly, that the ideas of progress and revolution do not coincide at all, and that today the West is pervaded by a progressive impulse that is not

1889), 47–8]. It is worth quoting not because it expresses a particularly original thesis but as a document of Rousseau’s quest to attain “simple” religion and theology against the claims of “high philosophy” (abstract rationalism). 19 The philosophies of progress of the nineteenth century generally present themselves as justificatory of the past and its necessity rather than as critical of tradition in the fashion of the Enlightenment. Consider the difference in tone of the Hegelians, the Saint-Simonians, and the positivists compared, for example, to Condorcet.

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in the least revolutionary. Of course, the latter implies the former, and there is no revolutionary thought without progressive spirit; or, actually, it is the very fact of coming after the formulation of the idea of progress that gives revolutionary thought its typical character. However, the opposite is not true: there can be progressivism without revolutionary spirit, first of all because the two ideas have different origins. The first one is tied to the new science, the second to the secular translation of eschatological thought into the philosophy of history. But, now, how does one go from mere technical activity20 to the spirit of technicity – namely, to the interpretation in technical terms of all forms of thought and human activity? Because it seems that the spirit of technicity differs from technical activity in the same way eroticism differs from love, aestethicism from art, politicism from politics, panlogism from logic, and so on. To put it in terms of religious philosophy, the spirit of technicity is an aspect of the revolt of values against the Value. Once values have lost their reference to the Value, their disorder is natural, and so is the claim by each one of them to be absolute, and the attempt to deprive other values of the autonomy that, conversely, is guaranteed by their reference to the absolute value.21 It is true that today this claim is advanced above all by technology, and that only by reason of scientism (of the methodic a-theism of science) does one go from relying on technology to overcome limited hurdles to faith in technology and to the correlative faith in progress. And it is true that the appearance of scientism always indicates a crisis of philosophy. I will discuss the nature of this crisis later. I think that now, regarding the difference between technical activity and the spirit of technicity, it is time to comment on two remote essays, La physique d’Aristote et la physique de Descartes by Laberthonnière and Les remarques sur l’irreligion contemporaine by Gabriel Marcel, first of all because they express the two extremes of the Catholic positions on this topic. The first, which is undated and was published posthumously,22 appears to date back (because of some political references) to no earlier than 1919–20; it

20 [TN] Tecnica in the original, see note 14. I did not use “technology” in this case because arguably it includes the very idea of “spirit of technicity” that Del Noce wants to distinguish from tecnica. 21 See the acute remarks by Felice Battaglia in his “L’ateismo e i valori,” in Il problema dell’ateismo, 27–35. 22 In Études sur Descartes, vol. 2, ed. L. Canet (Paris: Vrin, 1935), 287–344.

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was written as part of the life-long conversation between Descartes and Laberthonnière, which by its very nature produced not one organic work but essays rich with questions, which in part are still waiting for solutions; all said and done, it is the only one among the old-time books on Descartes that cannot in the least be said to be exhausted. Between 1909 and 1915 Laberthonnière had reached a decidedly physicistic interpretation of Descartes. In this new essay we find elements that tend to overturn it, or at least to present the physicistic interpretation – in the sense of an option for the world23 – as a partial perspective that needs to be integrated with others. Its essential thesis is the following. In his physics, Aristotle had come to represent the world as an ensemble of forms constituting an eternal harmony, which he paused to contemplate in order to enjoy it as a spectator. Descartes conceived it as a machine that produces its effects over time and that he intends to know in order not to contemplate it but, rather, to learn how to make it work and how to use it. The first is an artist’s physics, which abstracts from the needs that are imposed on us by our life on earth, and interprets the world as a beautiful thing to see, so that we may act just like pure intellects and dedicate ourselves to the divine pleasure of intellection and contemplation. The second is an engineer’s physics, which, rather than regarding the world as a beautiful thing and becoming aesthetically absorbed in its beauty, regards it as a good thing to possess and strives to possess it for the purpose of satisfying the needs of earthly life. On one side, a science of the contemplation of the world, on the other side a science of its exploitation. Starting from here, we understand their two theories of knowledge. For Aristotle it is a matter of identifying oneself with the world in knowledge; conversely, for Descartes it is a matter of distinguishing oneself from the world in order to affirm oneself apart from it and above it (the thought process that leads to the cogito) for the purpose of knowing the world from above and using it for one’s

23 “It is therefore necessary to discover the germ of moral life that constitutes the living principle of a doctrine; and it is by following the determinism of its development that we shall be able to assess its value; we shall see whether it can be lived or not. The types of germs of moral life [that are] living principles of doctrines perhaps are not very numerous. Perhaps there are only two kinds: to live for time, to live for eternity; the alternative” (Lucien Laberthonnière, Études sur Descartes, vol. 1, ed. L. Canet [Paris: Vrin, 1935], 2) [TN: my translation]. And supposedly Descartes chose to live for time.

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own ends. Now, which one of the two attitudes is more consistent with the spirit of Christianity? Shall we say without qualifications that Aristotle’s attitude is religious and that of Descartes is directed towards worldly ends? We must see the other side of the coin: making physics a science of contemplation of the world coincides in Aristotle with making politics a science of exploitation of man because the liberation of the wise man from material cares coincides with the imposition on others of the lower task of addressing them. Therefore, by assigning to himself the task of contemplating things in the beauty of their intelligibility, the wise man is led by that very fact to use men; hence Aristotle’s not merely speculative interest in the various forms of social organization, in view of finding indications about how to set up a social organism that makes possible the wise man’s life as free from material cares. Vice versa, Descartes is aware that the science he envisions presupposes that man as man is higher than things, is in a different order than the order of things, and must not be considered in the same fashion. Descartes’s physics teaches us to use the world as a means because man is spirit and the world is matter, and these two words no longer denote two elements or two aspects of reality but, rather, two absolutely distinct realities, two substances that exist each in itself, one higher by nature and the other lower, one able to know and to possess by knowing and possessing itself, the other made only to be known and to be possessed, destined to subjection. This leads us to say that Cartesian physics and the technology joined with it have a Christian origin because of the underlying conception that made possible their rise: they depend on a Christian truth, the affirmation of man’s transcendence over the world. By affirming that in every man there is the same nature and dignity as a thinking being, Cartesian physics implies that no man has the right to use other men, which brings us to the antipodes of Aristotle. Furthermore, Laberthonnière does not think at all that the new way of conceiving the relationships between men is a consequence of the change in the understanding of science but, instead, that the opposite is true: the idea that by nature and destiny man is superior to the world of things has created the conditions in which the rise of the new physics has been possible. And the cogito ergo sum seems to bridge the two moments in as much as it separates man from the world and sets up the soul, every human soul, as a reality independent of things, transcending things, and therefore as their rightful master. Nor, on this point, can one find a contradiction (and no text justifies it) between

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Cartesian thought and other forms of religious thought of its century, even the most ascetic. Pascal’s famous thought that the unthinking world is nothing compared to thinking man, since thinking man infinitely surpasses the world with his thought, is just the full expression of this Cartesian theme in which contempt for the world changed from an ascetic to a scientific thesis. If we wish to link this thesis of Laberthonnière to Péguy’s suggestive – and not worn out, despite too many repetitions – line that Descartes was a “French knight,”24 we might say that he truly represents the epilogue and the endpoint of the ideal of chivalry, in the work of liberating the humble from their earthly servitudes, through his physics and the consequent practice. In other words, technical thought is originally correlated with Christianity and with (virtual) democracy in the sense that the attribution to everyone of the same right and of the same power over things sets human individuals one next to the other, as equals.25 From Aristotle’s perspective, the wise man separated himself from men. From the perspective of technical thought he stands next to the other men, apart from and above things. As an overall formula, we can say that technology means replacing the exploitation of men with the exploitation of things. Hence, a radical negation of technology could only be a negation of Christianity itself. But, now, if this is the case, how could it happen that subsequently it took a completely different meaning? Indeed, it is obvious that nobody, facing today’s technologized world, is immediately led to think of its Christian origins. It is also fairly clear what deviation marks the transition from technical activity to what I called pan-technicism: what was thought about the world of things gets extended to men themselves, who become objects and instruments of a process of production, which in turn is directed by an individual will to power. We find one of the earliest expressions of this danger in a lecture by Marcel, given in 1930.26 24 Charles Péguy, Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 59. 25 From the standpoint of the history of political doctrines, we could say that the idea of this nexus of Christianity, democracy, and the positive value of technical activity is the initial theme that inspires Christian Democracy as a political position distinct from other Catholic positions open to the modern world (e.g., liberal Catholicism). 26 Published in Étre et Avoir (Paris: Aubier, 1935), 259–95 [TN: Being and Having, trans. K. Farrer (Westminster UK: Dacre Press, 1949), 179–202]. This view of technology underpins the distinction between problem and mystery, as can be seen, for

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We have a position that may seem the exact opposite of that of Laberthonnière (whose essay, published posthumously, Marcel could not know). But it is above all a matter of a different visual angle: one was looking at the origins of the technical spirit, the other at technology on the verge of reaching its full essor, when the humanistic spirit and the technical spirit were beginning to oppose each other. By technology Marcel means every discipline that tends to grant man the mastery of a determined object; and it is quite evident that every technique can be regarded as a manipulation, as a means to mould some matter that, in fact, can be purely ideal (e.g., a psychological technique). Therefore, there is a parallel between progress of technology and progress of objectivity. An object is the more an object the more it serves as matter for more numerous and more developed techniques. Thus, we understand why, according to Marcel, the technical spirit must progress towards a radical de-subjectification of the world, towards a world without soul and without interiority: the characteristic perfectibility of the world of technology constantly perfects depersonalization. In the technical vision of the world, man appears to be the only centre of order and organization in a world that, by all appearances, has been produced by chance, or has been torn away from chance by a violent act of human emancipation; therefore, the technical vision of the world is essentially tied to the Promethean myth. Depersonalization affects the subject of example, in the text “Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique” in appendix to Le monde cassé (Paris: Desclée, 1933) [The Broken World, trans. K.L. Hanley (Milwaukee WI: Marquette University Press, 1998)]. This critique must be linked to that developed by Enrico Castelli. See especially his Introduzione a una fenomenologia della nostra epoca (Florence: Fussi, 1948); I presupposti di una filosofia della storia (Milan: Bocca, 1952) (“the whole history of modern philosophy is the history of the race to solitude through the terror of solitude itself … The history of modern philosophy is, largely, the history of an obsession: objectivity,” 7); Il tempo esaurito (Milan: Bocca, 1954); L’indagine quotidiana (Milan: Bocca, 1956) (see especially the extremely important conclusion regarding “Il tempo giusto,” with a suggestive juxtaposition to the question of solipsism). It must also be linked to the critique by Martin Heidegger, particularly in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954) and in Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). “Technology as the highest form of rational consciousness, technologically interpreted, and the lack of reflection as the arranged powerlessness, opaque to itself, to attain a relation to what is worthy of question, belong together: they are the same thing” [TN: Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 87. Translation by J. Stambaugh in The End of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 99].

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the technique, who appears to be himself the object of possible techniques – techniques that are developed after the pattern of those that apply to the external world, but transposed. This impoverishment of interiority, which is the correlative of technology – which is directed by its nature to try to destroy it, and reduce it to a reflection of environmental situations – coincides with the exacerbation of the most immediate and most elementary elements of affectivity. Here we can discern why the most immediate naturalism and the most sophisticated technology become conjoined, leaving tradition behind in the name of a form of primitivism, and I would almost say in the name of a restored Edenic order, of which technology is the premise. This is natural, after all, since technology is the most complete negation of the awareness of sin, because the latter cannot be cured by any technique but only by a supernatural action – namely, grace. These arguments are special instances of a more general one, since religion and technology are defined as opposite terms. Indeed religion – in as much as it distinguishes itself from magic and sets itself in opposition to it – is the exact opposite of a technique: it establishes an order in which the subject is placed in the presence of something that he is not allowed to grasp in any way. In the act of bringing his hands together, the religious subject demonstrates by this gesture that there is nothing to be done, nothing to change, but simply that he is coming to make an offer of himself, and this is truly the sentiment of the sacred in which respect, fear, and love come together. If the word “transcendent” means anything, it is precisely this: it denotes exactly that sort of absolute and impassable gap that opens up between the soul and being because the latter escapes the grasp of the former. Conversely, for the technical spirit the world is a machine whose operation leaves remarkably much to be desired due to defects and errors for which nobody is to blame because nobody is there. Man is somebody only in front of an imperfect mechanism; and, in fact, he is perfectly ready to treat himself in the same way and to reabsorb himself into a depersonalized cosmos. It is natural that, from this perspective, life becomes the only value, and an action is good or bad if it contributes or not to foster it. We have seen how the ambiguity of technology (an ambiguity that is not unlike that of every other spiritual attitude, after all) seems to become clear in the opposite visions of these two thinkers. I have already mentioned that all Catholic commentaries take place within this fundamental opposition: if one looks carefully, the common and clichéd distinction

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between Catholic left and right is linked with it, in its cultural as well as in its political aspects. Because one side says: this world of democracy and technology is Christianity’s child, and rejecting it means wishing to return to a world of masters and servants, albeit unified by the religious idea; but this return would be illusory because, after the progress of technology, the religious factor would not play a unifying role but would take the appearance of an instrument that politicians use in order to maintain the differences and make them absolute. The other side says: in this world of technicism the sacred cannot find a place, and all the values of Christian morality must be denied; and it is not even possible to speak of a society when not only religious unity but also the simpler moral unity disappears; when there are irreconcilable and opposite moralities, like Catholic morality and a certain presentation of the morality of psychoanalysis. Hence the division in the Catholic world today, which pushes to the extreme the division of sixty years ago between archaists and modernists. Let us discuss whether this division can ­somehow be reduced. Because technology inserted into a Christian and theistic conception is one thing, and technology inserted into an irreligious conception is something else; and it is perfectly true that the irreligious conception must end up pushing technicism to the extreme in as much as it destroys the notion of adoration and the sentiment of sin. In a theistic conception technology is joined with the idea of the distinction between a reality lower than man and a reality that infinitely surpasses him. This is why, for example, in the “great Christian” Descartes, man’s transcendence with respect to nature is linked, in the very process of meditation, with the affirmation of God’s reality and transcendence as its condition; and certain themes that have been variously interpreted, like the theory of the free creation of eternal ideas, intend to sanction the idea of a reality that escapes our grasp completely and, thus, the possibility of adoration.27 But the place of technology is completely different in a resolutely irreligious system,

27 At the end of the third Meditation, after the first proof of the existence of God, he writes: “But before examining this idea more closely and at the same time inquiring into other truths that can be gathered from it, at this point I want to spend some time contemplating this God, to ponder his attributes and, so far as the eye of my darkened mind can take me, to gaze upon, to admire, and to adore the beauty of this immense light.” [TN: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D.A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 35].

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where it really tends to end up in total desacralization and total depersonalization of reality (leading to the question of solipsism, which is no longer encountered in the dispute about Idealistic gnoseologism but, rather, in lived experience).28 Therefore, it is appropriate to see a connection between the absolutization of technicism and the so-called “affluent” society, and to wonder whether the former may not be explainable starting from the process of formation of the latter, as the new reality of the period after the Second World War, whose rapid development has led to new ways of being, feeling, and expressing oneself that were absolutely inconceivable and unforeseeable twenty years ago – with the consequence that intergenerational understanding has become extremely difficult. We wonder, therefore, whether it is not technical progress that explains the affluent society but, on the contrary, the affluent society that explains the establishment of the pan-technicist mentality in its fullness. In order to characterize the affluent society, I will use very few propositions,29 to which obviously many others could be added. First of all, it is the society that succeeds in eliminating the dialectic tension that sustains the revolution by pushing alienation to the highest degree. Here a comment is necessary. By “alienation” I mean, in the most general sense, the mutual dehumanization of the relationship with the other. Each subject perceives the other as alienus, extraneous, separated – that is, not joined to me by devotion to a shared (not necessarily religious) value – and, therefore, as an ob-jectum, regardless of whether I deem this “thing placed in front of me” to be a useful instrument or an obstacle. Strictly speaking, society is no longer such because multiplicity is not unified: we have a society without meaning and without value because the normative idea and the utopian perspective of the City of God has disappeared. We need to clearly distinguish the two ideas of alienation and revolution, above all because, in recent years, people

28 The themes of alienation and activism in the affluent society lead logically to consider the question of solipsism. They do so because, besides the quietist form of solipsism (“reality is a dream”), there is also the activist form (“the world becomes real through and within my action”), and the study of this bond between activism and solipsism would be extremely important. But this is a question that cannot be addressed here. 29 I will rely above all on the very beautiful piece by Franco Rodano, “Il processo di formazione della società opulenta,” in La Rivista Trimestrale 2 (1962): 255–326.

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have preferred to focus on Marx’s youthful works and, thus, on the idea of alienation; and they have come to think that awareness of alienation pushed to the highest degree and revolution coincide, a notion that is as widespread as it is incorrect. The motives are easy to understand: the term “alienation” can be easily used to forge an image of Marx as a moralist and an iusnaturalist who supposedly criticized the economic realities of his time on the basis of the eternal and normative rules of natural law. This is the image that was already dear to social democrats in the name of Kantian morality or of the iusnaturalism of the 1600s and 1700s and is now dear to many Catholics in the name of Thomistic morality and the natural law. Actually, as far as the interpretation of Marxism is concerned, the problem is rather to investigate the reasons the term “alienation” disappears in Capital. It is the intensification of poverty, increasing poverty and not alienation, which makes the revolution inevitable; the revolution is bound to happen not in the name of a moral value but because of the immanent laws of historical evolution.30 Failing to understand this means really leaving aside the Marxist critique of ethics and forfeiting the distinction between utopian and scientific socialism. Therefore, there is room to attempt a society “of well-being,” which, even if it eliminates poverty and achieves the socialization of the necessary, nonetheless leaves alienation intact or pushes it to the limit. We can add: the affluent society gauges both the power and the impotence of Marxism. The power because in it Marxism forces its adversary, the society opposed to it, to manifest itself in its pure state, as a bourgeois society that by now is unencumbered by all ties with a Christian society, a liberal society, a seigneurial society. In it, the bourgeois character manifests itself in alienation pushed to the extreme degree and in the subsequent agonism and activism. I think we can say that, by rejecting the types of society that I mentioned, the affluent society marks the acceptance of all the Marxist criticisms while, at the same time, radically negating the Marxist religion. So, we can also say that it is an empiricist and individualistic translation of Marxism. But, on the other hand, Marxism seems impotent to overthrow it (I say “seems” because this is my opinion, but I do not have here, or later in this essay, the opportunity to prove it).

30 On this subject, see the excellent observations by R. Mucchielli, Le mythe de la cité idéale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 163ff.

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This concession in opposition to Communism explains why the affluent society is also radically distinct from a Christian society, or a seigneurial society, or a liberal society – namely, from the ancient ideal of the Christian society in which the transcendence of the Lord made the rigid distinction between the masters and the servants disappear (the Christian rehabilitation of the verb “to serve”; the derivation of auctoritas from augere) in as much as the established order was reduced to a mean whose end was the salvation and spiritual progress of individuals. Hence the importance in that society of the figure of the saint. In order to gauge how far removed from that ideal is our age, consider the following passage by Chesterton: “If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty.”31 By “seigneurial society” I mean not an ancient society but that which had its beginnings in the medieval opposition to Christian society and which, not by chance, during that beginning sought its cultural justification in Averroism. It is characterized by the idea that the world is not ruled by any providence or by any law of progress, meaning that it is subject to the law of eternal return; or, equivalently, that in itself it has no sense. In such a world man is offered two options: either to ascend to the sphere of heroes, by imparting meaning to events that in themselves do not have one, or to descend to the animal level. Thus, there are people who by nature are masters and people who are servants. Master is he who accepts man’s mortal condition and wants to redeem it by creating a work and, in order to accomplish it, “risks his life.” In this world without Providence, all is left for a man of valour is to manifest his “virtue” in the sense of Machiavelli, a manifestation that is worthy in itself, whether or not it is accompanied by fortune. Conversely, servant is he who is afraid of death or, to put it better, who obeys the natural

31 [TN] G.K. Chesterton, “A Short History of England,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 20 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 473.

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fear of death and precisely by doing so declares himself to be a servant; his only concern is thus to extend life, whereby he becomes a tool of the priests who promise him immortality or, more recently, of other priest who promise him, as the culmination of evolution, a state of affairs in which wars will be banished. Experience shows that few belong to the race of heroes, and very many are servants, and that the lapse of time does not bring any progress in this respect. Moreover, the two types do not share any common values. There is a morality of the masters and a morality of the slaves. If this is how things stand, it is natural for a master to think that the lower race should sacrifice itself totally for the education of those few exemplars who redeem mankind. Therefore, a seigneurial society must end up negating the metaphysical equality of men and, thus, reach a complete rejection, without sublation, of Christianity (depicted as the beginning of the rebellion of the slaves).32 Nor can the affluent society be presented as a development of the liberal idea because, even if it is essentially democratic (a type of democracy that welcomes Communism’s openness to the future, while rejecting its sacral character), its democratic orientation is based on the value of the substantive rather than the corresponding adjective, whereas in liberal democracy it was the value of liberalism that gave meaning to democratic institutions. Thus, we can say that in the affluent society, because of its initial rejections, there is no possibility of evolution in a Christian or in a liberal direction,33 or in directions that could be generically called Fascist (because of the rejection of the seigneurial society) or reactionary (because every reactionary position can only be ideologically oriented towards the past).

32 I discussed at some length the characteristics of the seigneurial society because many authors, and above all Fessard (in De l’actualité historique), have interpreted the famous passage of Hegel’s Phenomenology (chap. 4, sec. A) about the Master and the Slave as a prophecy of our time: the Communist rebellion of the slave, who has overcome the anguish of death through liberating work and, on the opposite side, the morality of the master, realized in its hardest and most complete form by Hitlerism. 33 Hence the need for these positions to rethink themselves. Rodano has written very important things about the work, first of all theological, that Catholic thought must do because of this necessity. See “Il pensiero cattolico di fronte alla ‘società opulenta,’” in La Rivista Trimestrale 3 (1962): 431–70. I should add that liberal thought faces the same necessity in the form of the problem of dissociating liberalism and bourgeoisie.

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In fact, the affluent society is the only one in world history that does not originate from a religion but essentially arises against a religion, even though, paradoxically, this religion is the Marxist one; and even though, because of the common enemy, it relies on the support of religious forces (or even allows political representatives of these forces to govern states but re-establishing a balance by favouring a distinctly a-religious culture). The explicit or tacit rejection of the values I mentioned has the effect of reducing the only value to pure sensitive efficiency. In the society of well-being, men are reduced to the simple economistic dimension of mere instruments for an activity that is not ordered to anything else. Hence, the tedium that assaults man in this society as soon as he leaves his workplace; the feeling of falling into a void, into complete irrationality,34 and also the agonism and activism that mark this society: the other is reduced to a bundle of needs that must be satisfied or, rather, that must be artificially multiplied so that the subject may affirm itself. This lack of a communication of universal values has the effect that the subject cannot feel to be a subject except in an exasperated individual search for the superfluous. It has been correctly written that “the affluent society … is the society of ‘hollow men’: beings without ends, without values, even without the reminder, the spur to salvation, of material suffering; beings who can feel alive only in the abstract frenzies of sex or in the sudden and unpredictable spasms, in the outbursts, of a sporadic and fatuous anarchy.”35 Which shows that this society is characterized by its own particular theory of alienation, entirely different from the Marxist one because what it cares about is a recovery of vitality. Hence the curious combination of instinctivist primitivism and technology. To free oneself from alienation means to free oneself from centuries of repression and inhibition of the instincts (in practice, from what traditionally used to be called morality, and which from the new perspective is said to be sexophobic ethics); repressed energy supposedly can manifest itself in forms of aggressiveness, hate, and resentment, which are the psychological preparations to what appears to be the greatest scandal to the progressive mindset – namely, war. This novelty is not the development of previous positions and, thus, it is an anti-tradition. To the younger generations accepting this novelty

34 See Rodano, “Il processo di formazione,” 265–6. 35 Ibid., 324.

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seems necessary in order to avoid falling into absolute pessimism – that is, in order to live. Perceptible efficiency is felt to be the only value, hence a technicistic spirit. There is an antithesis to what was traditionally thought to be Christian morality, and there is the idea of a “morality without sin” since the idea of sin lies at the origin of all anti-vital attitudes, of socially dangerous repressions. These are all aspects of one context, and no one of them can be elevated to primary causal factor. This shows how arbitrary it is to isolate from this context the association of technology and irreligion. Instead of being a necessary unity, it is a factual unity within the framework of the affluent society. Cannot we say, then, that the present irreligion of the Western world reflects the fact that, having constituted itself in opposition to Marxism, this world is subordinate to it due to a failure to really surpass it? As a consequence, the merely descriptive analysis must make room, expressly in order to be complete, for a causal factor, which can only be found in the definition of the essence of philosophical atheism. All of this will become more clear if we shift our discussion to the genesis of contemporary sociologism.

2. On Contemporary Sociologism Let us restrict ourselves to a consideration of two of its characteristics: that of being a form of integral relativism, which, precisely as such, distinguishes itself from skepticism; and that of being able to realize itself as such only by pushing to the extreme the Marxist theory of ideologies, to the point of regarding Marxism itself as an ideology. The tight analogy that links it to the affluent society is immediately apparent and is documented, after all, by the way in which their growth and their diffusion followed parallel tracks. And indeed sociologism (to be distinguished, of course, from sociology as science)36 presents itself as the

36 Is this sociologism new? It can be interpreted as a renewed relevance of Comte or as a curious development from Marx to Comte. Confirmations are very easy to find: besides the idea of sociology as a universal science, we can think of its political consequences – sociocracy and Comte’s rule by the savants – which would deserve to be compared with certain recent versions. On the other hand, it is true that Comte had very little direct influence on the genesis of contemporary sociologism and that the formative processes are different. But precisely for this reason a study of the peculiar form of Comte’s relevance today would be interesting.

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only truly post-Marxist position, just as the affluent society presents itself as the only truly post-Communist position. Furthermore, there is a rigorous symmetry in the relationship between both of them and tradition. In the case of sociologism, with respect to transcendent metaphysics and Idealist immanentism as well as Marxism and irrationalism. In the case of the affluent society, one cannot describe it as a development of Christian civilization or liberal civilization but, rather, as a new reality that uses forces or institutions of one or the other. Finally, we can observe the same religious ambiguity: as an empiricist position, sociologism generally does not deny the possibility of a transcendent reality but, in the meantime, it desecrates religions and metaphysics in the aspect in which they come to be part of historical experience. Integral relativism means that sociology – understood as a new universal science of human realities – and philosophy are opposed to each other because philosophy has always been characterized, openly or not, by the idea of eternal and absolute truths. Even Marxism itself; even, and visibly, skepticism, which sought its verification not in the abolition of the idea of absolute truth but in the fact that it is impossible to conceive it in as much as every thought depends on the subject’s concrete position in life and on his relationships with the social context. In the new education in relativist thought, one cannot speak of sociology beside philosophy, as a study of different questions, but of sociology that takes the place of philosophy because it completely fulfills its critical function. The Marxist theory of ideologies is pushed to the extreme, until it means that all perspectives of thought, including the Marxist, do not express something eternal but are always tied to certain social situations and cannot be understood apart from their correlations with them. When does one transition from normal criticism (what in the field of philosophy could be called academic criticism) to ideological criticism? The first concerns only expressed thought; the second wants to understand the real meaning of the expressions of the adversary by tracing them back to the subject who pronounces them, to his situation (hence the “existential” character of recent sociologism). In order to understand, one needs to go past what has been really expressed. When referring to an individual, we are still in a particularistic conception of ideology: we search in the individual’s psychology for the reasons for statements that distort reality; the criticism is moralistic. When referring to a social group, we move to the noological level of general structures

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of thought, we shift our attention to the forms that make reality appear in one way rather than another to a determined group of people, and this independently from any consideration about good or bad faith. Until a few years ago, the ideological method had been highlighted and used above all by Marxism in order to show that the assessment of reality proffered by its enemies was distorted to reflect the interests of the group to which they belonged (“false consciousness”). Now, this privilege of Marxism must be revoked: “The analysis of thought and ideas in terms of ideologies is much too wide in its application and much too important a weapon to become the permanent monopoly of any one party. Nothing was to prevent the opponents of Marxism from availing themselves of the weapon and applying it to Marxism itself.”37 By this extension, one moves from the simple theory of ideology to the sociology of knowledge; from what used to be the intellectual arsenal of a party to a method of research about intellectual history in general. Therefore, one claims that such a sociologically oriented history of ideas is called to provide modern men with a new vision of the whole historical process; to explain the works that belong to that now-surpassed genre “philosophy”; to explain, above all, the moral categories because the idea of the absoluteness of morals was the fulcrum of philosophy: “Deeper insight into the problem is reached if we are able to show that morality and ethics themselves are conditioned by certain definite situations, and that such fundamental concepts as duty, transgression, and sin have not always existed but have made their appearance as correlatives of distinct social situations.”38 First of all we must ask ourselves: Is it true that sociologism represents the extension of the critical aspect of Marxism, a sort of theory of general relativity replacing special relativity? Or is it rather the result, as the ultimate consequence, of accepting one particular critique of Marxism,

37 Karl Mannheim, Idéologie et utopie (Paris: Rivière, 1956), 72 [TN: Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 1997), 67]. Mannheim’s position can be generally viewed as a form of revisionism, if by this word we mean the effort to enucleate the truly scientific part of Marxism, starting from a culture that constituted itself independently of it. For Mannheim such culture is no longer a form of neo-Kantism or humanistic positivism but the philosophy of life. Starting from this consideration, one could present sociologism as the endpoint of revisionism. 38 Mannheim, Idéologie et utopie, 81 [TN: Ideology and Utopia, 72].

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which is necessary within a certain horizon of thought that cannot be elevated to an absolute criterion? Let us begin by observing that Marx did not consider social reality with the spiritual disposition of a sociologist, who in his research strives to set aside all judgments of value (at least if they are conscious) and to break free from every form of mysticism; who, therefore, wants to eliminate, as extraneous matter to science, all that is said in order to push men to do practical works. Rather, he considered it with the mind of the philosopher of history, who interprets universal history according to the principle that historical events and sequences are unified and directed towards a final goal; and with the attitude of the revolutionary (i.e., with a secularized eschatological mindset). And we must keep in mind that, concerning Marx, the very distinction between mind and attitude can only have a relative value since he arrived, by a philosophical route, at replacing the type of the philosopher with that of the revolutionary – that is, at that nexus of theory and practice that is usually, and correctly, recognized as the central point of his doctrine. It has been said that the philosophy of history is the past rediscovered and the future deciphered by the grace of a passionately lived present. This definition, which was devised for Saint-Simon,39 works perfectly to characterize Marxist thought, in whose genetic order the philosophical moment precedes and conditions the sociological observation, even if the expository form adopted for Capital may create the impression, at first, that the revolutionary thesis follows from a consideration of purely objective social reality; and there is no merit in the objection that although, de facto, Marx’s sociology is tied with his philosophy, this does not take away the fact that it can stand autonomously de jure and that, therefore, it can also be accepted starting from different philosophical positions. We find this dependence of the sociological perspective on the philosophical in every part of Marxist thought and, thus, also in the theory of ideologies. It has often been said that in Marx the meaning of this word oscillates: sometimes it is used in a pejorative, almost psychoanalytic sense, to denote the false representations that men form of themselves; sometimes it loses this negative meaning, so that it can be referred to

39 By Henri Gouhier, in La jeunesse de Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, t. 2, Saint-Simon jusqu’à la Restauration (Paris: Vrin, 1936), 274.

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Marxism itself, designated to be the ideology of the proletariat.40 But the difficulty can be easily eliminated by turning our attention to the reduction of the idea to instrument of production, which is achieved by a strictly philosophical route in the critique of speculative philosophy. Indeed, it implies the disappearance of the distinction between philosophy as contemplation or self-awareness and ideology as a practical instrument to act on the world, and the consequent absorption into ideology of all cultural productions. That is, the distinction between truth and falsehood is not carried out outside of ideology but within it: one can distinguish between reactionary ideologies, which justify and thus falsify the given reality, and progressive and liberating ideologies. In sum, according to Marx, there is philosophy that presents itself as such and is actually just ideology because it only enters history as the consecration of a certain given order, falsified as sacred, or at least as natural and immutable; and there is, instead, ideology that openly declares itself as a political and partisan stance because it wants to change the world and not simply contemplate it, which is truly philosophy, because it expresses the direction of history in its unfolding. In connection with this we understand the oscillations in his language between the pejorative and the positive meaning of the word; we understand the distinction between “true consciousness” and “false consciousness.” The fundamental type of false ideology is religion; and spiritualist and idealist philosophies in a broad sense, in as much as they end up in theodicy (in this connection, one could study the development of classic German philosophy, from Leibniz to Marx, as a process directed at liquidating the idea of theodicy). The fundamental type of true ideology is the proletarian one, which possesses universal validity because it is suited to bring to an end the existence of classes, alienated consciousness, and, therefore, the plurality of ideologies itself. We emphasize this aspect because the advent of socialist society is supposed to mark not the end of history but that of ideologies as false consciousnesses. From this priority of the philosophical aspect it follows that, despite its historicism, Marxism maintains a certain number of eternal truths 40 Gurvitch, in Le concept de classes sociales de Marx à nos jours (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1954), 29–30, distinguishes in Marx’s work thirteen (!) meanings of the word “ideology” “qui ne se recouvrent que très partiellement.” But I think that they can be reduced to these fundamental two.

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in the guise of theoretical judgments and judgments of value, which are thought as universal, as valid for all men in every age.41 For example: the idea of social man, understood as complete negation of the PlatonicChristian idea of participation – that is, the affirmation that man does not have an interiority of his own, so that he can find the truth by reentering it, but only thinks because he is in relation with other human beings (this critique of the category of interiority, in as much as it coincides with the critique of the category of privacy, is the foundation of the critique of private property); the idea of dialectics as the unity of rational and real; the idea of the objective possibility of the historical realization of an authentic human community characterized by the abolition of social classes and exploitation; the idea of the unity of theory and practice, whereby, from the critique of speculative philosophy and from the reduction of the idea to instrument of production, it follows that philosophy will no longer express itself in the form of a system, as comprehension of a realized totality, but in the realization of a totality; the idea of a modernist, let us say, vision of history, whereby it is true and will always be true that capitalist society, and the forms of thought that correspond to it (i.e., rationalism), have marked a progress with respect to feudal society and mystical forms of thought and that socialist society in turn will mark a progress with respect to capitalist society. And so on and so forth. These affirmations, thought as absolute truths, are what specifies the stance of Marxist philosophy vis-à-vis all others.42 As has been pointed

41 See the essay by Lucien Goldmann, “Le matérialisme dialectique est-il une philosophie?” in the volume Recherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 11–25, with whose theses (at the interpretative level) I perfectly agree. 42 This is indeed the only way to save the originality of Marxism as a philosophy. In the past there has been a tendency to deny it and, from a theoretical standpoint, to dissolve its synthesis into elements that did not exclusively belong to it. See, for example, what turned out to be the last work by Adriano Tilgher, clever as usual, “Interpretazione del marxismo,” in Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto 22, no. 1 (1942): 1–19. He writes: “Not one of the theses associated with Marx’s name is an original fruit of his mind. Where is then Marx’s originality? It is entirely and only of a prophetic, messianic and apocalyptic nature” (4). See also Maxime Leroy, Histoire des idées sociales en France, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1946–54), who believes he can find all of Marx’s ideas within the development of French revolutionary thought.

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out quite correctly,43 it finds itself separated from all the rationalist and empiricist philosophies of the modern age because it affirms the insufficiency of purely conceptual discourse and subordinates such discourse to action. Thus, it opts for an only relative and not absolute autonomy of philosophy (as a stage towards something that surpasses it). This assertion of only relative autonomy makes it akin to the rhythm of thought of Christian philosophy (rational thought as a stage towards Grace and Revelation), from which, however, it is radically separated because of its idea of total historical immanence. The emphasis on action and the value attributed to community separate it from Spinozism. The acceptance of evil as the road leading the good separates it from the thought of Pascal and Kant. This schematic description allows us to understand why Marxism is susceptible to being criticized from completely different directions, and why the criticism coming from each one of them cannot be accepted by the others without logical leaps. Now, the criticism that Marxism is an ideology, in the sense of being a mere instrument for action, derives precisely from the conception of philosophy as an absolutely autonomous conceptual discourse (in the sense that it is not an introduction either to religious contemplation or to revolutionary practice). We can easily convince ourselves of this if we examine the criticisms of Marxism formulated by the most rigorous thinker among those who proceeded in this direction – namely, Benedetto Croce. So, let us consider, in Conversazioni critiche, a piece he wrote over fifty years ago. We read: “It is enough to know how to read the famous theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, in order to dispel any doubt. Who speaks in these theses, addressing pre-existing philosophy, is not other philosophers, as one would expect, but practical revolutionaries … [T]he overturning consisted in surrogating philosophy with practice and the philosopher with the revolutionary … But, if this is the case, it is just as evident that Marx overturned not so much Hegelian philosophy as philosophy in general, every sort of philosophy … Simply put, under the guise of the habitual philosophical phraseology of his time and country he expressed, on the one hand, the personal indifference to speculation which he had matured, and on the other hand his energetic

43 Goldmann, “Le matérialisme dialectique,” 15.

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interest in politics … This is also the source of Marx’s and Engels’ constant habit of looking in philosophers precisely for what is not philosophical; the practical tendencies, and the social and class effects that they represent.”44 The exact same statements come up again in the essay of 1937,45 in which there is the perception of the new relevance of Marxist thought, which was being rediscovered – perhaps above all in France, as far as the Western world was concerned – after decades of oblivion: “Marx should not have looked for the science and philosophy of pure appearance and for ‘class ideology’ in Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, but in himself.” Now we have to ask ourselves whether sociologism may not be exactly the necessary epilogue of this critique of Marxism that reduces it to ideology. This is because, ultimately, if Marxism is a philosophy, one cannot expel it from the history of philosophical thought and relegate it to the history of ideologies without doing the same for all other philosophies – that is, without pronouncing the judgment that all the various philosophies, in as much as they contain judgments that are not experimentally verifiable, express only practical fears and practical hopes, entirely explainable by studying the social and historical condition in which they were born. We can try to draw an initial sketch of proof by considering the role that Gramsci’s critique of Croce played – certainly against its author’s predictions – in the diffusion in Italy of the sociologistic mindset. This critique is so well known that we certainly do not need to summarize it. Let us only recall that, according to Gramsci, the “historicity” of philosophy could not take any other meaning but its “practicity” and “politicity.” He was inserting himself into the polemics between Croce and Gentile to affirm that the form of historicism that Croce was being forced to embrace, in order not to yield to his adversary, could not achieve true consistency and a true liberation from the residues of “transcendence of metaphysics and theology” except in Marxist historicism. Croce “has

44 Benedetto Croce, Conversazioni critiche, serie prima (Bari: Laterza, 1924), 298–300. 45 Benedetto Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia, 1895–1900,” in appendix to Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, 6th ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1941). The sentence quoted below is found on page 294. [TN: an English translation of the book, by C.M. Meredith, was published much earlier (New York: Macmillan, 1914) and so does not contain the appendix to the 6th edition cited by Del Noce].

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re-translated the progressive acquisitions of the philosophy of praxis back into speculative language, and in this re-translation lies the best of his thought.”46 To continue him means precisely to criticize the “speculative” aspect of his philosophy and thereby to rediscover the true Marx as opposed to the Marx of vulgar materialism and economicism. The legitimacy of Croce’s speculative position would hold only if he had really been successful in his program of distinguishing philosophy from ideology; in actuality, his “speculative” retranslation leads instead to a conservative ideology, modelled after the concepts of revolution-restoration, national classicism, passive revolution. With Gramsci’s theses, Marxism demonstrated irrefutably that the surpassing-annihilating attempted by Croce had not taken place. But it was also a criticism that went too far: the remark, made by Croce (but not only by him) about the theological character that remains in Marxism was left in place. What could be easier than adding the two criticisms together, accepting the criticism of ideologism that Marx deploys against the philosophical positions he opposes, and, on the other hand, extending it so that it applies to Marxism itself, in the classical form in which it presents itself? And what could be easier than directing attention and hopes towards a form of thought free of every theological element (regarded as anti-democratic) in which Marx, Dewey, left-wing existentialism (I already mentioned the existentialist cadence of sociologism: shifting the attention from any thesis to the man who pronounces it, who is always inside a situation) and the new positivism are all reconciled? I did not use Croce as an example by chance, because his thought – expressly due to the insufficient critique of Marxism from which it had started (insufficient and yet necessary within a certain idea of philosophy that seemed justified by the secular forms of modern thought) – seems to run the risk of figuring in the history of philosophy as a transitional moment,47 and only in Italian thought, from naturalistic positivism (i.e.,

46 Antonio Gramsci, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin: Einaudi, 1948), 233 [TN: “The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce,” in Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Derek Boothman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 385]. 47 Of course (do I need to say it?) I say “seems” with the intention of highlighting how one-sided and partial is this judgment; which however, is by necessity extremely common among people inclined to neo-positivism, and I daresay especially among

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the naturalistic involution of positivism that had taken place especially in Italy) to sociologistic positivism. He had presented himself as the philosopher of the restoration of the divine: “Absolute historicism does not deny the divine … It only denies the transcendence of the divine and the corresponding metaphysics, unlike positivism, empiricism, and pragmatism which, in order to get rid of transcendence and of metaphysics, suppress philosophy itself … Therefore, how can there be any affinity, let alone identity, between them? If anything, historicism feels a greater affinity for religions and for the old metaphysics it fought against and it surpassed – which in its own way welcomed and thought the divine – than for dry positivism, empiricism, and pragmatism.”48 To him, there was a completely unquestionable matter of fact: by then the age of the transcendent God had permanently ended. But, among the philosophical trends that had welcome this end, and that therefore could call themselves modern, there was an opposition: on the one side, there were those like the positivists, the pragmatists, and the Marxists, according to whom true humanism is atheistic; on the other, there were those who took up the heritage of the past and intended to replace the old God with the immanent divine. So, Croce’s primary foe was a certain kind of secularism; this because the other foe, transcendent religion, could no longer be considered an adversary since, from the standpoint of rigorous thought, in his judgment it was dead. It was a matter no longer of destroying its vestiges but of surrogating it. Ten years after his death, we can say that Croce’s secular adversaries have triumphed completely. The new sociologism merges the three forms of thought he abhorred: positivism, empiricism, and pragmatism. Moreover, it is not the case at all that these trends, in their new formulation, continue his teaching in the sense of preserving it by sublating it. Because the new positivism does not intend in the least to be a synthesis between the young, even if it is rarely formulated explicitly. How little I agree with it can be shown by the fact that in the act of writing it what came to my mind was Brunschvicg’s judgment of Thomism as a mere “transition between Augustinian scholastics and nominalist scholastics” (Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale, t. 1, 2nd ed. [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953], 111). In Brunschvicg’s historical perspective this, too, was a necessary judgment. What I want to stress is just how broad is the revision that Croce’s philosophy needs to undergo in order for its still alive core to come to light. 48 Benedetto Croce, Il carattere della filosofia moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1941), 195–6 [TN: my translation].

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old-fashioned positivist thought and Croce’s philosophy but, rather, the reassertion of positivism, freed from all the elements that caused its defeat by the Idealist critique. And the new Enlightenment is not in the least a synthesis between the old Enlightenment and romantic themes but, rather, intends to mark the complete liberation from Romanticism. And the formula that would make Croce quiver in his grave – history as the sociology of the past – is common. Croce used to say that, regarding Marxism, we cannot speak, in a strict sense, of surpassing it because in it there is no truth to preserve; but this did not discharge his debt of gratitude to it because he had drawn from it the suggestion for the definition of the economic dimension. We can say that today the situation is exactly reversed. For the great majority of today’s secular thinkers, Croce’s philosophical thought has died for good; what is left of him is just the memory of an episode – and, nobody will deny it, of a great episode – of Italian culture and the gratitude for a methodologically and anti-metaphysically oriented magisterium. Elsewhere, many years ago,49 I talked about the annihilating function that Marxism performs with respect to philosophies as absolutely autonomous conceptual discourses. Today’s situation seems to perfectly reconfirm that old judgment of mine: the acceptance by non-Marxist positions of this annihilation of philosophies – or of the type of worldview that many people identify with philosophy – has expressed itself in the form, which at that time I could not predict, of sociologism. But if this is how things stand, we must work our way back to the initial reason for the process of which sociologism is the ultimate conclusion; which implies, once again, understanding the widespread natural irreligion of the West as a secondary and derived phenomenon, the mere observation of which can only yield disconnected materials. The formula in which Marx opposes his becoming-world of philosophy to Hegel’s becoming-philosophy of the world is very well known; and here I certainly will not go into an explanation of why this overturning of Hegelian philosophy coincided with replacing Christianity-becomephilosophy with radical atheism. We are now interested in another one of its meanings: Hegel’s becoming-philosophy of the world was tightly linked with his “cunning of Reason,” with the translation of the idea of

49 In my essay “Marx’s ‘Non-Philosophy’ and Communism as a Political Reality,” reprinted in this volume.

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Providence, with his theological humanism. It meant to say: the true meaning of historical actions escapes their authors and reveals itself completely only when the philosopher becomes aware of it. On the contrary, Marx thinks that only an authentic becoming aware makes possible the action that leads to a total revolution, meaning the end of exploitation and alienation. And in order to understand this novelty of his, let us not forget that a common thought of the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century was the idea that the French Revolution had been a partially failed, or in any case unfinished, work by reason of the scarce awareness of their historical role on the part of its authors, who were convinced of bringing about freedom, equality, and brotherhood for all, while in actuality they were creating the conditions for the rise of bourgeois society. If one believes in the power of ideas in history, one has to say that the new fact of our century is the manifestation of the type of positive atheism, of which the becoming-world of philosophy is the formula, characterized by the particular relationship between theory and practice that I discussed earlier; and that, consequently, “contemporary history” is philosophical history because it is the unfolding of this essence, and the various positions that take part in it are not intelligible except in relation to this first point of reference; hence its novelty with respect to so-called “modern history” (from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the First World War). Therefore, historical actuality brings us back to analyze the philosophical essence of atheism as the primary question.

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Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961)

Atheism as an invasive reality is the most characteristic phenomenon of our epoch, unprecedented in history. This is why it is urgent to have a precise definition, adequate to a new problem. I would like to approximate this definition starting from a discussion of the thesis proposed by Maritain.1

1. Absolute Atheism and Practical Atheism After stating that by positive and absolute atheism he means “an active struggle against everything that reminds us of God – that is to say, antitheism rather than atheism – and at the same time a desperate, I would say heroic, effort to recast and reconstruct the whole human universe of thought and the whole human scale of values according to that state of war against God,” and having recognized the appearance of this form of thought as the unprecedented historical event that characterized the contemporary age, Maritain explains the rise of absolute 1 J. Maritain, La signification de l’athéisme contemporain (Paris: Desclée, 1949) [“The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism,” in The Range of Reason (New York: Scribner’s, 1952)]. This work is the perfectly worked-out summary of the position about atheism that appeared as necessary to this philosopher after Humanisme intégral and the works that followed it. It represents his stance after the peculiar outcome of the Second World War, whose beginning was under the banner of an alliance based on natural law against barbaric and irrational forces, and whose conclusion was that the victory of the forces inspired by that first idea coincided with a diffusion of atheism such as had never been seen before.

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atheism as a response to the practical atheism of a certain Christian world: “absolute atheism … is both the fruit and the condemnation of practical atheism, its image reflected in the mirror of divine wrath. If this diagnosis is true, then we must go on to say that it is impossible to get rid of absolute atheism without first getting rid of practical atheism.” According to his definition, practical atheism is the atheism of those “who believe that they believe in God but who in actual fact deny His existence by their deeds.”2 Now, to me this point of view seems inadequate. I believe one can say that it is valid in reference to certain forms of apparent and contradictory atheism – for example, Proudhon’s. But these are forms that have not had any effective influence on contemporary atheism. The reaction against the practical atheism of a self-described Christian world may well explain heresies; it may well explain protest in the etymological sense in as much as it is directed against the use of Christianity to support temporal power; it may well explain anti-clericalism in the broadest sense, to the extent that it possesses its own precise essence and is not just accidental to certain cultural and political positions; but, in my judgment, it is not useful in order to explain atheism. Allow me to linger on this point, asking the question: Which actual form of atheism did Maritain depict? Evidently, writing in 1949, he did not have in mind a precise doctrine but, rather, an attitude that was widespread at that time and that still today is by no means exhausted: the transition of secular awareness from a theological type of humanism to an atheist humanism and the temptation that some theses of this second humanism posed even for Catholics. But this does not take away the fact that the position he describes unexpectedly assumes (and certainly independently of his intention) typically Proudhonian features. Did he think of Proudhon when he used the term “anti-theism”? I do not think so at all, but still it was Proudhon who coined it;3 and it does not indicate something more radical than plain atheism but, rather,

2 [TN] Maritain, Range of Reason, 104, 117, 103. 3 See the splendid book by Fr Henri De Lubac, Proudhon et le Christianisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1945) [TN: The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon, trans. R.E. Scantlebury (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948)], whose only flaw, if we really need to find one, is that it did not adequately emphasize Marx’s great philosophical superiority over Proudhon and the essential irrelevance today of the thought of the latter.

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intends to signify anti-clericalism carried to the extreme, much further than that of Voltaire or Condorcet, to such a degree that all its axiological and metaphysical implications are made clear. For Proudhon, Catholicism represents the authoritarian principle; but for him such a principle is proper to every church, even though Catholicism is the perfect realization of the clerical idea. Now, his position is extremely interesting precisely because it shows the impossibility of arriving at rigorous atheism by merely pushing anti-clericalism to the extreme; because it suggests, in short, that atheism and anti-clericalism are different essences. A comparative study of Marx and Proudhon should start from here because, in the former, we have a politics that proceeds from philosophical atheism and, in the latter, anti-theism that proceeds from an ethical-political experience. Well, the first, and not the second, is able to come to practice. We know that Proudhon’s anti-theism expresses itself in particularly drastic formulas: to recall the harshest of all, “God is evil.” But it has been observed that the virulence of his language should not mislead us. It has been said that his thought has an essentially antinomian character – that is, it is characterized by a desire to push antinomies to the extreme before seeking reconciliations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it has, above all, a polemical character in the sense that he is only able to think by opposition; his umediated polemicism leads him to accept the language of his adversary. To him “God is evil” means that God is the power that opposes the immense dialectic chain of progress, conceived as the progressive manifestation of Justice in mankind; and the correlative power, the Revolution, which so far has known four essential stages – the Gospel’s affirmation of the equality of men in front of God, the Protestant and Cartesian affirmation of the equality of men in front of reason, the affirmation of the equality of men in front of the law, and that finally must know the affirmation of social and anti-bourgeois equality. To him there is a trinity of absolutism: the capital in the economic order, the state with its anti-liberal function in the political order, the Church in the order of intelligence. And in this trinity the central role is played by the Church, which is the foundation of the legitimacy of the state and thereby of the untouchability of capital: “the first duty of an intelligent and free man is unceasingly to drive the idea of God out of his mind and his conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to

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our nature.”4 He must be fought in the name of that idea of revolution, or “theology of immanence,” which, in his judgment, nobody had yet theorized and of which he wanted “to write the Bible.” In fact his formula must be understood in the same way as the other one, “property is theft,” which refers only to abuses of property and can be reconciled with its opposite – “property is freedom.” This is so much so that people have correctly said that his critique of property only meant to conclude in a system of jurisprudence. In the same way “God is evil” seems to be just systematic negation, destined to arrive at an equally systematic higher affirmation. There is an interpretation of the opposition between God and man that does not rule out the possibility of a further situation in which the opposition would stop and God would no longer appear as evil. Proudhonian anti-theism is directed against the idea of religion understood as a force of conservation and social cohesion in the two forms in which it had been presented in the first half of the nineteenth century: that of the legitimism of the prophets of the past and that of the accommodation between bourgeoisie and Catholicism. Above all, he had in mind the theodicy of economic harmonies, used as justification of the capitalist bourgeoisie; the general laws of social mechanics that people thought had been established by God to lead to the best organization and that claimed that the individual quest for profit would coincide with universal well being; its followers, utopians like Bastiat, politicians like Thiers, the selfish and sordid interests of those favoured by these laws; the Church, which, called to defend “Property” and “Order,” accepts the deal and brings religion to bless the selfishness of private interests; the dogma of original sin, pressed into service to consecrate exploitation; and so on. His fight against the “God of Providence” goes against a fatalistic providentialism that regards such laws as providential and justifies their subsequent abuses. Likewise, his polemic against charity in the name of justice is directed against charity as part of this order, called to help a power that by itself could not withstand the rebellion. The appeal to the autonomy of moral conscience, then, is directed against the pure extrinsicism of divine arbitrarism.

4 From the Système des contradictions économiques ou philosophie de la misère, t. 1, 382, quoted by De Lubac, Proudhon, 184 [TN: Un-Marxian Socialist, 171–2].

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Furthermore, in order to have a complete picture of Proudhon’s thought, we must also look at his polemic against the atheistic humanism of Feuerbach and Marx; and it is this polemic that leads him to wonder, albeit incidentally, whether the end of humanity, instead of being the elimination of God, may not be a definitive reconciliation with God and the transition from time to eternity. The conclusion of De Lubac’s book highlights perfectly the unresolved antinomy in which his thought ends: Proudhon then was opposed to Marx and on more than one ground threw back at him the reproach of Utopia. If, for instance, the mark of a Utopian spirit, for Marx, is the placing of one’s confidence in moral forces, for Proudhon, on the other hand, Utopia consists in trying to recast society without “stirring up anew consciousness of Justice.” He could have said what Péguy afterwards said: “The Revolution will be a moral one or else there will be no Revolution.” If he did not believe that humanity will one day be able to settle itself in a definitive harmony, it is because, first of all, he did not believe that human intelligence will fathom the mystery which attracts it. Whereas for Marx “humanity lays down for itself only problems that it can resolve,” Proudhon, on the contrary, was of opinion [sic] that “our thoughts go further than it is given us to reach.” Therein he saw the greatness as well as the destitution of our intelligence, in that powerlessness which kept it ever open and prevented it from being satisfied with any solution in which it would be imprisoned. If our intelligence is seemingly weak, it is because in it, as on some high ground swept by all the winds, “eternal forces throng and clash and sway one another this way and that.” Let others fancy they have reached the goal. Let the Positivists think they have banished metaphysics for evermore. Let the Humanists think that they have rid themselves of the great Phantom for evermore. Proudhon, who was their victim, shared in their negations, but he shows them that the pendulum has swung the other way. No, “the antinomy cannot be resolved.” “The fight against God is never-ending.’”5

I said that the ultimate question that the study of Proudhon can lead to is the problem of the distinction between anti-clericalism (as an essence) and atheism. In fact, he seems to oscillate between two different positions, depending on whether his adversary is Catholicism or Christianity itself (since he constantly joined together Christian truths

5 De Lubac, Proudhon, 315–16 [TN: Un-Marxian Socialist, 296].

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and their use by a certain Christian world) or the divinization of humanity, carried out by the various philosophies of history. Now it would be interesting to examine the development of his thought in the philosophy of Renouvier, a development that highlights the break with atheism. This continuation takes place, more than by direct influence (there was no sympathy between the two thinkers), because Proudhon and Renouvier share in common a moralism that sets them in opposition to the historicism of the left-wing disciples of Hegel and because their humanism differs from that of Feuerbach in being radically anti-­ Hegelian.6 Moreover, every stance in their thought is actually, and professedly, a cover for a moral attitude, which is precisely anti-­ clericalism, understood as aversion to every idea that gives rise to a form of clergy. The Catholic clergy, of course, is viewed as the greatest example of this deviation, but there is also the clergy of scientists invoked by the Saint-Simonians and the Comtians, or the Hegelian clergy of philosophy professors, or other forms of clergy in which Hegel’s disciples conclude. By this route, one arrives at something completely different from atheism: a form of individualism that detects in every clergy a materialistic and atheistic element due to the replacement of moral faith by statutory law and worldly will to power. In the conceptual formulations, one arrives at variations on Kant’s religious philosophy. Indeed, the assertion that the moral conscience is autonomous, and the rejection of ethics based on historical outcome, leads towards a radical dualism of morals and history. But, then, will not this moral conscience that allows one to judge and devalue history necessarily appear to be a sign of a transcendent reality? This is the disposition that, in Renouvier, determines a process that brings him to his final Christian, albeit heretic, philosophy. But, in fact, we can also find the essential elements for a definition of anti-clericalism as opposed to atheism in the recent history of Italian philosophy. In Martinetti – this typical nineteenth-century man, the last  philosopher of the 1800s living in the fullness of the 1900s, Renouvier’s spiritual brother to such an extent that, in reference to them, we could speak of parallel lives – we have the same union of 6 The convergence between the two thinkers has already been outlined by P. Mouy, L’idée de progrès dans la philosophie de Renouvier (Paris: Vrin, 1927), 56ff, but the subject should be taken up again. Regarding the development of Renouvier’s thought, see the two volumes devoted by M. Méry to the Critique du christianisme chez Renouvier (Paris: Vrin, 1952).

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anti-clericalism with a heretic Christian philosophy. The fact, then, that anti-clericalism at its most consistent concludes in fairly unpersuasive cosmological or historical visions does not matter. What matters is that, whereas absolute atheism is marked by the will to refound the world so as to build a man without any trace of God, anti-clericalism in its extreme sense leads instead to a position of detachment from the world. A history of anti-clericalism and heresy ought to illustrate how, in the course of its process, its political aspect keeps getting weaker, while this same aspect gets stronger and stronger in atheism; in the former, detachment from the masses gets greater and greater, in the latter the quest to reach them gets more and more intense; in the former, the critique of the technical world gets sharper and sharper, in the latter, the interpretation of the world in terms of technical thought becomes more and more prominent. I think we can say that, at the bottom of anti-clericalism, there is really a moral reaction against the political atheism of bad Christians; conversely, at the bottom of today’s absolute atheism there is an entirely different impression – that today a morality founded on the transcendence of the Lord cannot really be a guide in social life. In atheism, the condemnation of the Christian world in the name of morality is replaced by the recognition that this world is condemned, for being surpassed, by history.7 *** 7 We might say, with an extremely approximate little formula, that the way of thinking of a consistent anti-clerical is “Kantian,” whereas that of today’s atheist is “Hegelian.” This not in reference to Kant’s and Hegel’s overall systems but to their moral philosophies. Please let me insist again on the idea that Renouvier is a paradigmatic thinker, much more than Voltaire himself, for the study of anti-clericalism. This is because the conditions needed for the idea of anti-clericalism to reach its definitive determination had come to maturity only in the 1800s, with the greatest flowering of the philosophy of history and with the religions of Humanity. Renouvier’s Christianity without Catholicism – presented as the final stage of the Protestant Reformation because of its individualism and yet irreconcilable with every historical form of Protestant theology – is in fact the inverse of Comte’s “Catholicism without Christianity” and intends to signify anti-Hegelianism (anti-philosophy of history) carried to the extreme. Can we still speak today of anti-clericalism as a substantive? I would say that it is a phenomenon that has almost disappeared, exactly in connection with the diffusion of atheism.

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Maritain could pronounce his thesis because absolute atheism appeared to him to be characterized by a choice: “A man does not become an absolute atheist as a result of some inquiry into the problem of God carried on by speculative reason … [but] by virtue of an inner act of freedom, in the production of which he commits his whole personality. The starting point of absolute atheism is, in my opinion, a basic act of moral choice, a crucial free determination … a kind of act of faith, an act of faith in reverse gear, whose content is not an adherence to the transcendent God but, on the contrary, a rejection of Him.”8 Now, to me the problem has to be posed in the following terms. It is very true that, at the foundation of absolute atheism, there is an option – that is, a consideration of values prior to a consideration of reality. The problem of the value of truth, in the Nietzschean sense,9 is viewed as antecedent to the problem of truth. This is why for today’s atheist the question of the existence of God is a “vain curiosity,”10 in the strong sense that this expression had for mystics and saints; why the attempt to prove the non-existence of God is replaced by the attempt to show that atheism alone makes possible the full realization of scientific, moral, and political humanism;11 why in this sense we should speak of a rejection not primarily of God but of the theistic disposition – that is, of the reasons that led people to pose the question of God – whereas old atheism was still merely an answer to this question; why today we face a true and proper atheistic ascesis as a quest to free consciousness from the phantom of God regarded as the ghost of past cultures and

8 Maritain, La signification, 12–15 [TN: Range of Reason, 105–6]. 9 In the sense that, for example, is expressed thus by Spengler: “It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge … Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting” [The Decline of the West, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928), 12]. 10 Sartre writes: “Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference” [“Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Plume, 1975), 369]. 11 Thus contemporary atheism represents a complete inversion of the position of the philosophy of the 1600s: indeed, the Cartesian meditation was an effort to reduce the atheist to the insipiens, who cannot be certain of the truths of science nor even of those of common sense (the reality of the external world).

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civilizations that casts its shadow on the present; why, in connection with this, the romantic figure of the tormented and desperate atheist, nostalgic for the age of faith, has disappeared (we can say that absolute atheism implies a break with Romanticism). This situation can also be expressed in the terms used many years ago by Max Scheler.12 What characterizes our century is “postulatory” atheism, whereas in the common cultural awareness of the 1800s the desirability of God’s existence was an incontrovertible presupposition.13 That is to say, the 1800s was the century of Rousseau (“My son, keep your soul in such a state that you always desire that there should be a God and you will never doubt it”) and Kant (to hope for harmony, in an ultra-perceptible reality, between virtue and happiness is a fundamental and legitimate aspect of the human condition), and our century comes after Nietzsche. At that time the problem was: Does any reality correspond to the generally recognized aspiration towards God? Is a reconciliation possible between the needs of the soul and rigorous knowledge?14 This formulation was accepted by the majority of positivists. A few among them, by keeping the desirability of the existence of God while affirming its unprovability, ended up concluding, through a process of varying length, that its affirmation was plausible, arriving, in short, at a spiritualistic positivism (and then Boutroux would become their idol). Others were steady in the agnostic stance of unknowability, but the unknowable ended up taking the role of a bridge between religion and science. Others, finally, were influenced by other positions – philosophy of history, with the subsequent religion of humanity; the Hegelian left; the materialism where the disciples of Feuerbach who had not accepted that Marx had surpassed him ended up; or the idea of a naturalistic interpretation of Spinozism – and then they affirmed as the perspective of “reason” that the existence of God and the operations of reality

12 In the essay “Mensch und Geschichte” of 1926 [TN: “Man in History,” in Max Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives, trans. O.A. Haac (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 65–93]. 13 I say “common cultural awareness” because, rigorously speaking, the essence of atheism was brought to fulfilment in the nineteenth century; in our century we are only witnessing its diffusion. 14 These are, roughly, the initial words of the classic book of nineteenth-century spiritualism, Lotze’s Microcosm.

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cannot be reconciled, judging inferior, subjective, and non-critical the perspective of the “heart” tied to the desirability of the existence of God. They used to say: unfortunately, we find ourselves forced into a dramatic conception, in which the agreement between the subjective needs of the heart and the objective needs of reason is not possible. In other words, atheism was presented as scientism,15 thus becoming liable to the spiritualist and Idealist critique. Conversely, today people say: the negation of God is necessary to make possible a truly rigorous morality, science, and politics. As the negation of the theological foundation of science, morality, and politics, today’s atheism negates first and foremost what for the philosophical culture of the 1800s was unquestioned (that God is a value) and, therefore, inhibits the process from the value of  God to his existence, which was typical, in different guises, of ­nineteenth-century thought. We can say that the transition from the scientistic perspective to the optative perspective characterizes the atheism of the last few decades, including, as we shall see better later, Marxist atheism. This is a consequence, to a significant extent, of Nietzsche’s influence and of posing philosophical questions in terms of value. But we may wonder whether this process simply marks the rise of a new species of the genus atheism or is, instead, the declaration of the essence of atheism itself. Whether, in other words, there is an atheism rooted in a practical choice and another atheism that emerges as a consequence of a purely rational, disinterested investigation into the nature of being; or whether, instead, the presentation in terms of scientism always dissimulates an original practical choice, which is in fact the one declared by postulatory atheism; or, furthermore, whether atheism is not always a direct answer, in the form of refusal, to the question of the sacred, rather than an inference drawn from a profane consideration of the world, even though, just like the religious vision, in its scientistic form (in what can be called the scholastic of atheism) it seeks confirmation in proofs that claim to be rational and binding? But what exactly are the terms of the option? What is the nature of the atheistic act of faith? 15 By “scientism” I mean the generalization of the methodological atheism that is proper to science. By itself such methodological atheism means explaining phenomena without the intervention of transcendent causes and does not mean at all the negation of God.

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2. Atheistic Moments in the History of Philosophy A serious discussion of this point must necessarily start from an investigation of the atheistic moments in the history of philosophy. First of all, let us focus our attention on the Renaissance and the modern world without trying to answer the difficult question of whether one can truly speak of atheism in ancient thought. In my judgment, and in view of what I am going to say later, there can be complete atheism only after Christianity. This is because atheism is characterized by an initial rejection of the supernatural, which is something entirely different from the rejection of the mythical or magical mindset by the philosophers or even by the so-called atheists of antiquity. Moreover, true atheism can only come to the fore as the terminal stage of a direction of thought, as the negation of every theistic virtuality therein; and it is worth noticing that none of the great directions of ancient thought ends in atheism. I think I found confirmation of what for me was only a conjecture – or better, the consequence of a thesis that had been suggested to me by considering irreligion in the modern and contemporary world – in the exemplary paper by Carlo Del Grande.16 Neither was there, it seems to me, a medieval atheism in a rigorous sense, even though there were positions (heterodox Aristotelianism) that, in subsequent stages of their evolution, manifested themselves as atheistic. Because the adversaries of St Augustine’s thought – skeptics, Neo-Platonists, Manicheans, and Pelagians – were not atheists; and St Thomas targeted Averroists, who were not atheists in a proper sense, and Gentiles (i.e., Muslims, Jews, and pagans). The very insistence by medieval thinkers on the rational proofs of the existence of God shows, in my judgment, that one cannot speak of Medieval atheism because facing the problem of atheism requires one to move beyond the domain of proofs. These latter presuppose, in fact, an already religious atmosphere: by justifying the affirmation, of which one is already certain, of the existence of God, they define the relation between God and the world within the religious vision; they move within a conception that is already sacral. For medieval thought, atheism is more a logical 16 “Negazione di un ateismo ellenico,” in the volume Il problema dell’ateismo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962), 43–55 [TN: these conference proceedings happen to have the same title as the present volume].

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possibility,17 advanced by an always-defeated objector, than a real position. There is no atheism in a proper sense, I think, before Machiavelli (and it matters little whether Machiavelli was an atheist or not  – Machiavellianism is atheistic). Having thus narrowed down the investigation, we must observe, first of all, that the phenomenon of atheism comes about at the terminal moment of each of the three fundamental modern directions that call for going beyond religion into philosophy and, thus, for the negation of the supernatural. First, at the terminal moment of the thought of the Renaissance, in libertine thought, viewed of course in its higher aspect, the libertinage érudit of the seventeenth century. Second, at the terminal moment of the Enlightenment, whose peculiar character is that in it we find associated three moments of thought that, in the first half of the 1600s, seemed to be in conflict – the libertine critique of tradition, the trends in religion and natural law (which, under the effect of such critique, transition from a conciliatory to a revolutionary tendency), and the spirit of the new science. After the dissociation of this synthesis, which is the form in which the Enlightenment meets its end, libertinism continues as decadentism, the revolutionary spirit as Marxism, and the scientistic spirit as positivism. And third, at the terminal moment of classical German philosophy, with the two absolutely opposite and irreconcilable forms of Marx and Nietzsche. We can also express this idea in the following form: in history we have two essential atheistic positions, a negative atheism, or what is often called nihilism, which consists in the declaration of the end of a supra-sensible world with the power to obligate,18 and a positive atheism that intends to be precisely the most rigorous critique of this nihilism. It will lead, in Marx, to the foundation of the ideal city by unifying two position that were traditionally opposed (extreme utopia and extreme historical and political realism), in Nietzsche, to a new source of values situated in the will to power.

17 By this I do not mean to say, to be clear, that the atheist doubt, as doubt, did not always exist and did not always contribute to the purification of the idea of God. I mean that only in the modern age has atheism been able to present itself as the rigorous conclusion of a direction of thought; and that, therefore, from the standpoint of the periodization of the history of philosophy, one can call modern age that in which the phenomenon of atheism manifested itself. 18 A definition due to Heidegger.

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Here, a very important question arises: Should Nietzsche’s thought be regarded as paradigmatic of the form of absolute and positive atheism, or should it be described, instead, as the critical crisis of atheism because it is “tragic thought,” in the sense of “a conflict without a way out”? It has been said that Pascal represents the “tragic moment” of religious thought; I think that, a fortiori, Nietzsche’s work could be studied as the “tragic moment” of secular thought. Let us start from the common judgment: Nietzsche must not be regarded as a teacher of action but as he who had a prophetic vision of the contemporary world and provided a framework within which to interpret it. The metaphysics of the will to power, in as much as it turns truth into a “vital value,” has the exact same form as thought in terms of technical activity: it replaces thought that enters into relationship with being with this pan-technicist thought. In actuality, Nietzsche’s thought does not overcome nihilism, but rather fulfills it: But yet Nietzsche grasps the metaphysics of the will to power precisely as the overcoming of nihilism. And indeed, the metaphysics of the will to power is an overcoming of nihilism  – provided that nihilism is understood only as the devaluation of the highest values and the will to power as the principle of the revaluation of all values on the basis of a new dispensation of values. However, in this overcoming of nihilism, value-thinking is elevated into a principle. If, however, value does not let being be being, be that which it is as being itself, then what was supposed to be the overcoming is but the completion of nihilism … If, however, the thinking that thinks everything according to values is nihilism when thought in relation to being itself, then even Nietzsche’s experience of nihilism as the devaluation of the highest values is still nihilistic.19

However, in this fulfilment of nihilism it highlights its essence. What is it? Heidegger’s answer is well known: the metaphysics of the will to power is the true fulfilment of the history of Western metaphysics, which has forgotten Being in favour of beings. In its final stage, the nature of beings reveals itself as “will to power.” For sure, this is first of all the 19 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot,’” in Holzwege, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957), 239 [“The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 193–4].

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conclusion of so-called modern philosophy from the 1600s to the 1900s, but this is because the latter had been prepared by all previous philosophy.20 Being a conclusion, it justifies a definition in terms of “forgetfulness of Being” of the contemporary situation, viewed then as the final stage of a decline and not as a moment in a process towards liberation; and viewed as a crisis that cannot be healed through scientific and political techniques. But should this decline be viewed as definitive? Or does the Nietzschean decoding of the contemporary age help instead to reopen the discussion on the “God who is to come”? But let us set aside Heidegger, in whose analysis it is possible to distinguish one part (the fullness of nihilism reached by Nietzsche and his prophecy of the contemporary world), which can also be accepted from perspectives different from his own, and an interpretation of the history of metaphysics, which obviously can be discussed only by discussing his whole philosophy. It seems to me that the undeniable aspect of truth of his rethinking of Nietzsche can also be expressed in less esoteric terms. Would it be incorrect to say that the nihilistic transfer of the “locus” of values from supra-sensible reality to the will to power marks the transition to a new mythical age (the age of ideological myths)? And, in this case, does not Nietzsche’s teaching define the defeat that befalls atheism in its attempt to realize itself as positive atheism because it leads not to the full realization of reason but, rather, to a new mythical age, after the rational age? And should not the continuation of Nietzsche’s thought, after its failure to overcome nihilism, lead us to call into question the postulate of the “death of God”? Curiously the mythical age of nihilism gives a new peculiar relevance to the thought of Vico as the only theistic philosopher of the possibility of returning to the mythical age (a deeper consideration would show that, in Vico, theism and the possibility of returning to the mythical age are linked, so that whoever denies this possibility in the name of a vision of history as development [e.g., Croce] must also deny Vico’s theism; just as whoever views this decline as necessary must deny it – for example, Spengler,

20 In the second volume of Heidegger’s Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), see the quite unconvincing pages 141–9 devoted to Descartes, which come immediately before the fundamental paragraph on Das Ende der Metaphysik. Essentially, Heidegger gives a subjectivist interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, which is very similar to that of Gentile, except, of course, that he transcribes it in a pessimistic, or actually catastrophic, sense.

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who in a sense was the continuer of the Vichian motif rejected by Croce, although he never quotes Vico). This complex perspective raises a number of problems that so far have not been studied but that need to be solved because otherwise it is not possible for Catholic thought to take a stance vis-à-vis the contemporary world. I will limit myself to briefly mentioning a few of them: (a) First of all, we must observe that the historical vision I proposed, about the necessary appearance of atheism at the terminal moment of rationalistic positions, is far from habitual and demands a deep ­revision of how the history of philosophy is framed. According to the usual interpretation, libertinism is just an episode in cultural history, and Marx’s philosophical thought is a mere accident of the pseudo-­ philosophy of the dissolution of Hegelianism, which is interesting ­exclusively because of its power as an ideological tool (that is to say, its study is the province of sociologists and historians of political ­doctrines). Atheism appears in the histories of philosophy only as materialism, and the aspect of it that makes it the extreme expression of the rationalist attitude is set aside. Regarding Marx, this is i­nevitable in Hegelian or neo-Hegelian or neo-Kantian historiographies since these positions of thought are characterized precisely by the initial expulsion of Marxism from the history of philosophy.21 It is easy to give examples: for early Hegelian historiography, consider Fischer; for neo-Hegelian historiography, Croce or Gentile; for the beginnings of neo-criticist historiography, Lange, and for the final period Brunschvicg or Cassirer; and we could also add, although in this case the discussion would become more complex, Dilthey, Weber, and so on (in short, all of German historicism, the “critical” philosophy of history). I think that there is no such impossibility de jure for Catholic historiography and that for Catholic thought it is possible to carry out a positive critique of Marxism – that is, a critique subsequent to its placement (not its expulsion) in the history of ­philosophy. However, we must also keep in mind that, in practice, Catholic historiography has been influenced by the schemes of ­secular philosophy.

21 See G. Lukàcs, The Destruction of Reason [trans. P. Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1980)].

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We can also say that Hegelianism and neo-criticism, as philosophies of immanent divinity,22 find themselves forced to reduce to apparent atheism the forms of atheism they meet in history, excluding from the history of philosophy in a rigorous sense those that ­cannot be reduced to apparent atheism. Thus, for example, in Renaissance thought they consider philosophical what flows into in Bruno, whereas they exclude the libertine crisis. And this is natural and necessary if, within rationalism, atheism constitutes a position that goes beyond that of immanent divinity and cannot be defeated by it. But what might be the result of a true introduction of the consideration of atheism into the history of philosophy? (b) From the previous considerations it also follows that we cannot speak in a proper sense of a history of atheism because, properly speaking, no development exists. There is a curious symmetry ­between the historical stages of atheism and those of socialism (utopian socialism-scientific socialism) It stands out because in both cases it is impossible to speak of historical development and also because there is absolute opposition in the first stage (­libertinism, the legacy of Machiavellianism and utopianism) and complete identification in the second (Marxism).23 (c) It is important to observe that in the case of both nihilistic atheism and positive atheism, the starting point was in politics – in Machiavelli, the true teacher of the libertine writers,24 and in Marx’s critique of Hegel. This leads to the question, which I will bring up again later, of the role of the political moment in the ­formation of atheism. It is not coincidental that, from the political

22 Despite the variety of their forms, they can be brought together under a common label because the task they set for themselves is to free the idea of God from the transcendent realistic conception, where in their judgment transcendence can only mean spatial exteriority. See Croce, Gentile, Brunschvicg, Carabellese, and so on, all of whom share this judgment about transcendence. 23 Marxist atheism is not the development of negative atheism, and Marxist socialism is not the development of Utopian socialism; regarding the impossibility of speaking of historical development in regard to socialism, see Croce’s remarks, Discorsi di varia filosofia, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1945), 277ff [TN: in the original this note is a parenthetical statement]. 24 On this matter, I take the liberty of referring to my own essay “La crisi libertina e la ragion di stato,” in Atti del II Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici (Milan: Bocca, 1952).

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standpoint, atheism goes together with phenomena like the ­secular version of absolutism and totalitarianism. Negative atheism has an aristocratic character. It gives rise to the formation of narrow groups, of sects; in the extreme case we have individualism as criminalism in de Sade.25 Therefore we ­understand why it was fought by Robespierre in the name of the revolutionary spirit. Conversely, the proper character of positive atheism is to reach the masses, which is why in our century atheism presents itself as an invasive reality. This substantial link between atheism and the political forms that ­oppose freedom can lead to the following question: whether it is an essential feature of atheism that it necessarily informs the r­ealization of such forms, and this in the very act in which it ­presents itself, and must present itself, as the most total demand for freedom; and whether the current crisis of freedom and the atheistic invasion are not two sides of the same phenomenon. (d) Also interesting for a phenomenological study of atheism is the form of antithesis that it must establish between Greek and Christian thought. Indeed, observe the following: in the libertine crisis we have the fracturing of the Catholic and humanistic unity of the ancient and the Christian; in Marxism we have the fracturing of this same unity in the form that had been reaffirmed by Hegel. In libertine thought, anti-Christianity took shape by 25 Regarding the precise definition of the distinction and the relation between the two atheisms, it is extremely interesting to study de Sade’s stance on the Revolution, a research project initiated by P. Klossowski, Sade mon prochain (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1947), 13–43 [Sade My Neighbor, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 47–65]. In its original position libertinism presented itself as a justification of the secular version of absolutism. But in another respect it desacralized it, effectively re-establishing the ancient relationship between Master and Slave against the vestiges of Christian society. Hence the attitude of some libertines, and typically of de Sade, towards the Revolution. As Klossowski correctly says, for de Sade there is no question “of inaugurating the blessed age of recovered natural innocence. For Sade, the regime of freedom should be, and in fact will be, nothing more or less than monarchical corruption taken to its limit” [Sade my Neighbor, 52]. Thus, the Revolution is accepted as bringing about a “remolding of the structure of man” [Sade my Neighbor, 48], but this remoulding must take place according to the libertine model and not the Rousseauian model. It would be important to study de Sade’s radical antithesis to the two possible developments of Rousseau’s thought – the Romantic-Catholic one and the Revolutionary-Robespierrean one.

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eliminating the trends of ancient thought that prefigured Christianity; in Marxism, it took shape by developing one-sidedly, through the reduction of thought to world-transforming technology, the theme of man’s domination over the world, as a sign of his ­transcendence, which is originally biblical. We could say that the crisis of that time took place against the background of the ­appearance that religious Christianity was no longer, while secularized Christianity was not yet; and that the background of today’s ­crisis is that secularized Christianity (Enlightenment, Hegelianism) is no longer. We can wonder to what extent the relation of pure ­antithesis between Hellenism and biblical thought is inseparable from atheism, so that we can say that the currents of Christian thought that profess this relation are actually influenced, unaware, by their adversary. While it is also true that these positions have their aspect of truth in the reaction against the Gnostic-type ­recomprehension of Christianity that is proper to metaphysical ­rationalism. Thus, the question of atheism leads us to revise the very difficult problem of the correct relationship between Greek thought and Christianity, showing that the ordinary perspectives of continuity and opposition are inadequate.

3. The Atheistic Option This observation about the historical placement of atheism has a consequence that in my judgment is very important. We can wonder whether the critique of evidences at which atheism necessarily arrives in the process of making itself absolute (in the form of libertine atheism still linked with skepticism as well as in the form of decadent atheism and in the form of historicist atheism) – that is, the optative and postulatory character that rationalism in its extreme form must take26 – only highlights a certain initial option that conditions not only the rise of rationalism but also all its internal categories. In other words, we can wonder whether we can arrive at the following definition: 26 This optative character also accounts for the modus operandi of the contemporary atheistic critique. For it, it is a matter of criticizing theism by uprooting it, that is, by shedding light on the human roots of the process whereby God has been elevated to a value, a process that is the premise to the affirmation of his existence. It is important to observe that the study of history shows that there is true atheism only

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atheism presents itself as the terminal stage of a process of thought that is initially conditioned by a negation without proof of the possibility of the supernatural and that in its earlier stages of development declares itself to be a purification of the idea of God, the transition from the transcendent God to immanent divinity. If we call this initial negation of possibility “rationalism,” we can say that atheism has the function of highlighting its original option, the denial without proofs of the status naturae lapsae. The option that defines atheism is not primarily and essentially a response to practical atheism. Conceptions of the world take shape depending on an initial response to the problem of original sin – and some philosophies of existence deserve credit for having brought this to the fore. Once again, rationalism is a conditioning attitude, and the great objective merit of today’s absolute atheism is that it allowed this to become clear. From this perspective we can say that the rationalist attitude is simply the assumption, as a consequence of the initial rejection of the Fall, that man’s current condition is his normal condition; it coincides with an original moral devaluation of miracles and of the supernatural in the broadest sense and, thus, with the negation of free creation and of the theme of sin in their biblical meaning; with the abandonment of the Bible to historical criticism and to the investigations of ethnologists.27 But such assumption that man’s fallen reality is his normal reality cannot but coincide with the assumption that the mortal destiny of finite being is normal and, thus, with the affirmation of the negativity of the finite. These categories get clarified historically if we consider what is undoubtedly the most important chapter in the whole history of atheism – namely, the process of thought from Hegel to Marx. In Hegel alienation is surpassed through Idealism as the dissolution into thought of the reality of the finite; by the absolutization of the type of the

when criticism of the proofs of the existence of God is replaced by the attempt to uproot by clarifying the origins: this is already the case in the negative atheism of the libertinage érudit. 27 The Bible is abandoned to that natural history of the supernatural whose profaning character has been well highlighted by Enrico Castelli. See his essay “La problématique de la démythisation,” in Il problema della demitizzazione (Padua: CEDAM, 1961), 13–17.

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philosopher (i.e., of the man who achieves his freedom by taking the perspective of being considered in its totality). We know how in Marx this perspective is replaced by an entirely different one. But it is important to notice that this replacement takes place based on the thesis of the mortality of the finite, viewed as the soul of dialectics.28 Of course, 28 Regarding the relationship between the idea of death and dialectics in Hegel, the very well-known book by A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) seems fundamental to me [TN: Introduction to the reading of Hegel, ed. A. Bloom, trans. J.H. Nichols, Jr (New York: Basic Books, 1969), which, however, does not include the essay “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” which Del Noce quotes here. It was translated separately by J.J. Carpino and published in Interpretations 3, nos. 2-3 (1973): 114–56. The page numbers below refer to his translation]. “But for the Christian this ‘absolute’ Spirit is a transcendent God, while for Hegel it is Man-inthe-world. And that radical and irreducible difference amounts in the final analysis to this, that the Christian Spirit is eternal and infinite, while the Spirit that Hegel had in mind is essentially finite or mortal. It is by introducing the idea of death that theo-logy is transposed into anthropo-logy. And it is by taking that idea literally, that is, by suppressing the notions of survival and resurrection that we arrive at the true or Hegelian anthropology” (154–5). Observe how the concepts are linked together: Hegel intends to carry out the transfer into philosophy of the only truly anthropological tradition, the Judeo-Christian one, in order to make possible a philosophy that explains “how and why Being is realized, not only as Nature and as natural World, but also as Man and as historical world” (115); but in this transition “Nature is a ‘sin’ in Man and for Man: He can and must oppose himself to it and negate it in himself. Even while living in Nature, he does not submit to its laws (miracles!); to the extent that he is opposed to it and negates it, he is independent in the face of it; he is autonomous and free. And by living ‘as a stranger’ in the natural World, by being opposed to it and to its laws, he creates there a new World that is his own; a historical World, in which man can be ‘converted’ and can become a being radically other that what he is as a given natural being” (120–1). It is starting from this replacement of the agonism against sin with the agonism against nature that, in my view, one arrives necessarily at the thesis emphasized by Kojève: “The Christian notion of an infinite and eternal Spirit is contradictory in itself: infinite being is necessarily ‘natural’ given[-and-]static-Being; and created or create-ive, ‘dynamic,’ namely, historic or ‘spiritual’ being, is necessarily limited in time, which is to say [that it is] mortal … Hegel wanted, from the start to apply to Man the Judeo-Christian notion of free historical Individuality, unknown in pagan antiquity. But in [the course of] philosophically analyzing that ‘dialectical’ notion, he saw it implied finitude and temporality. He understood that Man could not be a free historical individual except on condition of being mortal in the proper and strong sense of the term, that is, finite in time and conscious of his finitude. And having understood that, Hegel denied survival: the Man that he has in mind is real only to the extent that he lives and acts in the midst of Nature; outside the natural World he is a pure nothingness. But to deny survival is in fact to deny God himself … The would-be

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now I cannot linger on this point, which has already been discussed so many times anyway, but I only wish to highlight a passage that is not well-remembered but that I deem extremely significant. We know that in 1888 Engels rethought the philosophy of the young Marx in his work Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy.29 People may definitely say, often going way too far, that Engels’s mindset was not very philosophical; and yet, it seems to me that in this work the relationship between Hegel and Marx is sufficiently well defined. Idealism is accused of being unfaithful to the dialectic because of a

‘transcendent’ or ‘divine’ non-natural World is in reality only the ‘transcendental’ (or speaking) World of historical human existence, [a world] which does not go beyond the temporal and spatial framework of the natural World. Thus, there is no Spirit outside of Man, living in the world” (122–3) [TN: the last sentence does not appear in J.J. Carpino’s translation]. “Thus the ‘dialectical’ or anthropological philosophy of Hegel is in the final analysis a philosophy of death (or, what is the same thing: of atheism) … Acceptance without reserve of the fact of death, or of human finitude conscious of itself, is the ultimate source of all of Hegel’s thought, which does no more than draw out all the consequences, even the most ultimate, of the existence of this fact” (124). Certainly, this atheistic interpretation of Hegel by Kojève is historically questionable; but it has the great merit of giving us a decisive orientation to understand in its full meaning the transition from Hegelian theological rationalism to radical atheism. Consider also Hegel’s passages about the fall [TN: here Del Noce refers the reader to page 279 of the French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, vol. 2, and to page 293 of the French translation of the Philosophy of History, but without specifying which editions]: the Fall is represented as the necessary condition so that the Spirit may be truly itself, moving beyond the innocence of the animal condition. Jean Hyppolite says perfectly: “infinite spirit should not be thought through beyond finite spirit, beyond man acting and sinning, and yet infinite spirit itself is eager to participate in the human drama. Its true infinity, its concrete infinity, does not exist without this fall … we must learn that this fall is part of the absolute itself, that it is a moment of total truth. Absolute self cannot be expressed without this negativity; it is an absolute ‘yes’ only through say­ing ‘no’ to a ‘no,’ only by overcoming a necessary negation” (Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 525 and 527). On this point see also J. Maritain, Moral Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 129–31. Is there not, therefore, a very tight relationship between the sacrifice of the individual in Hegel’s philosophy (“the dialectical immolation of the person,” as is well said by Maritain, Moral Philosophy, 149) and the thesis of the necessity of the Fall – in the sense that Hegelian philosophy intends to be precisely the justification of the necessity of the link between finite existence and death? 29 [TN] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941).

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failure to overcome supernaturalism. Now, the starting point for the development of this critique is expressed in this sentence: “In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.”30 Is it not extremely significant that in Engels the enucleation of the rationalistic aspect of Hegelianism can only take place by pinpointing the essence of rationalism in the idea of the naturalness of death because this affirmation rules out every possible reference to an original Fall of which death would be the consequence? But concerning this negation of the initial Fall, a negation that by necessity must be without proof,31 it is particularly important to consider carefully the idea of revolution, which has found in Marxism its definitive expression. It is very well known that the novelty of Marx with respect to Hegel lies entirely (in the sense of the general novelty that implies all the partial novelties and is verified by them) in the replacement of the type of the philosopher by that of the revolutionary, the philosopher being the type whose existence has exhausted itself in the pure contemplation of being and of its dialectical motion, to which he has nothing to add and in which he has nothing to change, but only everything to understand and justify. This is because such a figure presupposes the realization of an “end of times,” the achievement of a thesis to which no antithesis is any longer opposed, of a situation in which there is no longer negativity, and whereby Hegel’s novelty (i.e., the positive mediating function assigned to negativity) is lost. In common discourse, this word “revolution” takes various meanings.32 The first and oldest makes it simply a synonym of “revolt”: 30 [TN] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, 11. 31 On the particular historicity of original sin, see the important remarks by Fr Fessard in the volume Demitizzazione e Immagine (Padua: CEDAM, 1962), 75–6: “its historicity is absolutely unique because, coming before any other historicity, it is by that very reason not objectively representable.” 32 Regarding the history of this term, the chapter “L’idée de Révolution de Babeuf à Blanqui,” in Maxime Leroy’s Histoire des idées sociales en France, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1946–54), 340ff, is very interesting. The chapter devoted to “La Révolution” by R. Mucchielli in Le mythe de la cité ideale, 147ff, is also quite good. Of course, two  texts that remain fundamental are G. Lukàcs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein [History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972)]  – which, on top of everything else, is interesting as a document of the transition,

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revolutionary dynamics obeys an unintentional teleology, which leads to the destruction of the civic order. And since this destruction is not possible without the intervention of the masses, revolution is equivalent to a popular insurrection that is either acephalous or directed from outside by demagogues, adventurers, sectarians. This is the only sense in which the word was used until the end of the 1700s. We find it again in the reactionaries of the 1800s – who use the term “revolution” to designate a movement aimed at the destruction of the European order – but joined with the impression of its fatality: thus people talked about revolution using men rather than being guided by them, about the unintentional character of its destructive finality, and so on. All these themes were thought through for the first time by De Maistre. Then it continues in the sociologists who were critical of democracy, whose ideas derive, to a lesser or larger extent, from Taine: the revolution is “an aspect of the psychology of crowds,” “a disease of the social body whose causes we must find,” and so on. A second sense is juridical-political: people call revolution any change in the political order of the political societies known as states when that change is carried out in violation of the legal constitutional principles that embody the order itself – that is, without respecting the procedures that regulate legitimate partial changes. Evidently this sense is entirely different from the first. According to the first, violence is essential to the revolution; as destructive violence, according to the second, it is not. According to the first, the revolution is an irrational event; according to the second, it can be allowed or required by meta-positive juridical principles. A third sense is the ethical-political one, which designates the “rising”33 of a new order as an inseparably moral and political reality that cannot be explained in terms of a simple evolution of the past. In this sense people used to say, for instance, that the Italian Risorgimento was a through the totalism of the revolutionary, from the revolutionary idea to totalitarian reality  – and K. Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949)  – about the theological presuppositions of the philosophy of history. Nor should one neglect W. Nigg, Il regno eterno (Milan: IEI, 1947), and the well-known book by A. Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951) [The Rebel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956)]. 33 “Sorgimento” in the original. The word is no longer used in modern Italian but survives in the name Risorgimento (“re-rising”) given to the period of Italian unification in the nineteenth century.

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revolutionary process because it was a “rising,” and this is why it is presented as the model of a revolution that was “liberal” and not “Jacobin.”34 In the fourth sense, Revolution is an ideal category that is reached through a philosophical process. It means the liberation of man, via politics, from the “alienation” imposed on him by the social orders that have been realized so far and is rooted only in the structure of these orders. Therefore, it implies the replacement of religion by politics for the sake of man’s liberation since evil is a consequence of society, which has become the subject of culpability, and not of an original sin. As varied as the forms of revolution, understood in this sense, can be, their common feature is the correlation between the elevation of politics to religion and the negation of the supernatural. The Revolution, with the capital “R” and with no plural, is that unique event, as painful as labour and delivery (this is the metaphor that keeps reappearing in its theoreticians), that mediates the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom, where this latter is described – and it could not be otherwise – through the mere generic negation of the institutions of the past (a society without a state, without churches, without an army, without crime, without a judiciary, without police, etc.); that generates a future in which nothing will be like the old history; that is, thereby, the resolution of the mystery of history. When did this idea originate? I think its origins are fairly recent, not before Rousseau (not before a particular aspect of his thought, which contradicts other aspects).35 Certainly I am not saying that there were no deniers of original sin before Rousseau: but this denial had not been associated with the idea of the possibility of a new order according to nature but, rather, with the idea that religions are fictions useful for shoring up the existing social order. Then, in the first half of the nineteenth century, this idea went through a development linked with the 34 In History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), and in general in all of Croce’s work, we find present, and set in opposition, the first and the third (which is thought to include the second) of these meanings, while the fourth seems to be absorbed into the first. Regarding the opposition, see this passage: “The horror of revolution that made itself felt at this time and which runs through the entire nineteenth century, which was yet to carry out so many revolutions, was in reality the horror of the democratic and Jacobin revolution” (32). 35 My friend Sergio Cotta, who is one of the most competent scholars of Rousseau, not only in Italy, has kindly shared with me his manuscript “Philosophy and Politics in Rousseau,” which fully confirms this view of mine.

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historical judgment that the French Revolution had been left unfinished.36 In the course of this development, it broke away from the idea of going back to the state of nature and linked itself to the older idea of progress – which had already been elaborated by the Enlightenment – with the philosophies of history acting as mediating terms. Thus, we have the fullness of the idea of Revolution when the “ideal city” is viewed as the result of history, after Hegelianism – precisely in Marx. The starting point and the ending point show that its process goes from an initial negation of the supernatural to radical atheism. However, regarding this process of atheization of the revolutionary idea during the period from Rousseau to Marx some brief remarks are necessary in relation to a theme that has never been explicitly studied. We all know the thesis that presents Cartesian thought as a dike against irreligion. If we consider Rousseau’s thought from the angle of the Profession de foi, it looks like a second dike, erected against the same adversaries after the apparent erosion of that built by the three great men of French religious thought in the 1600s – Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche. It is a form of religious thought that comes to the fore after having accepted the criticisms that the Enlightenment had formulated against the first direction for being metaphysical and tied to theological stances. The symmetry could not be more rigorous. Just as Descartes had turned around the doubt of the libertines, so Rousseau turns around the meaning of the invocation of nature on the part of the philosophes; whereas Descartes had made an appeal against the errors of childhood, against the scruples of social morality, against the gods who must go back to the imaginary regions whence fear called them out, in Rousseau the voice of nature becomes identified with a divine instinct that makes the infallible distinction between good and evil, which teaches that justice is immutable and eternal, that all does not end in death, and that the immortality of the soul, by re-establishing order, justifies Providence; that man is not only a sensitive and passive being, but active and intelligent; that he is not an accident of a blind nature but the privileged centre of a world that has been made for him. We could easily provide further details: for instance, the isolation 36 Indeed, historians of the French Revolution, in particular Michelet and Quinet, were those who spread the revolutionary myth in its generic formulation as the advent of Justice and Freedom against privilege and authority. I already mentioned the important role of Proudhon in the elaboration of this idea.

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with respect to the religious tradition in which Rousseau perceives himself, as the rediscoverer of genuine religion, is quite analogous to that experienced by Descartes with respect to the scientific and philosophical tradition. But, on the other hand, Rousseau does not call into question the Enlightenment’s judgments about the culture of the past; nor, above all, the Enlightenment’s rehabilitation of human nature and, thus, the critique of the interpretation of the human condition as the result of original sin. Therefore, Rousseau’s religion comes into focus as a form of Pelagianism (shall we say, the most rigorous form of Pelagianism?): it affirms God, freedom, and immortality but denies sin and grace. Now, in this context, in this curious combination of a critique of the atheistic type of the Enlightenment with the preservation of the Enlightenment’s rejection of original sin, that extremely important fact, the birth of the idea of Revolution, takes place. Because how can one explain evil, given man’s original goodness, if not by referring to an artificial state of society? So religious liberation is replaced by political liberation: only the social contract can restore virtue to man. The problem of evil is transposed from the psychological and theological level to the political and sociological level: the dogmas of Fall and Redemption are transferred to the plane of historical experience. In brief, Rousseau’s problem is the co-presence of two fundamental elements, both new, which later will dissociate: the one that lies at the origin of much of nineteenthcentury spiritualism and the one that mediates the transition from Enlightenment thought to revolutionary thought. At this point we can account, at the level of the necessity of philosophical essences, for the present irrelevance of the nineteenth-century philosophies of postulatory theism, which depend, directly or not, on Rousseau’s religious position and on the extraordinary influence it exercised as a decisive moment setting the direction of philosophical trends.37 This influence has been so extraordinary that, as we saw, the greater part of nineteenth-century positivism did not call into question

37 Besides the well-known influence on Kant, one must consider the influence Rousseau exercised on French philosophy, to the point of starting a sequence, I think, Rousseau-Maine de Biran-Lequier, which reminds us, mutatis, of the sequence Descartes-Pascal-Malebranche of the 1600s, and which shapes the greater part of nineteenth-century spiritualist thought (I tried to work out this thesis in my work “Jules Lequier and the Tragic Moment of French philosophy”).

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the desirability of the existence of God. In fact, which of the two elements co-present in Rousseau, and later mutually opposed, has greater power? The spiritualism that came out of Rousseau identified atheism with naturalistic materialism without being able to foresee the new form of materialism that would make possible the fullness of revolutionary thought.

Regarding Biran, the book that Gouhier devoted to Conversions de Maine de Biran (Paris: Brin, 1948) is illuminating in every respect. It also suggests the question of whether the process in Biran’s thought that goes through a sequence of conversions, from Rousseau to Fénelon, may not be described as the rigorous continuation of Rousseau’s thought, separated from the revolutionary aspect  – even though these conversions are a continuation and a deepening that cannot take the character of rational derivation or even of evolution but, rather, of continuous creation. While it remains true that “it is because Rousseau speaks to his heart that later Fénelon and the Imitation found the way open in him” (words by P.-M. Masson, La religion de Rousseau, t. 3 [Paris: Hachette, 1916], 307, cited and approved by Gouhier, Conversions, 400). Biran’s descendance from Rousseau takes on particular importance because it ­disproves the familiar thesis about Biran’s Pascalianism and, implicitly, the thesis linked with it concerning the Pascalian descent of the French spiritualism of the nineteenth century (a thesis that, however, becomes necessary if one minimizes Pascal’s Jansenism). In his thought process Biran met Pascal twice, in 1793 and between 1815 and 1818; but “in 1793 Pascal ran into a friend of Jean-Jacques, certainly better disposed to follow him than a disciple of Voltaire, but fully satisfied with natural religion, and not feeling the need to follow him all the way to the mystery of Jesus. In 1815, Pascal runs into the founder of psychology; now, no matter how far from materialism the tendencies of the new science may be, this latter makes unnecessary the explanations that, in the Pensées, transform anthropology into an apology for Christianity; it meets neither sin nor grace: early Biranism justifies the reservations of the young reader of Rousseau” (Gouhier, Conversions, 376). For Biran there is no experience of an initial Fall, and it is doubtful that there is room for original sin in his philosophy. In Journal intime, on 9 October 1817, he remarks that, according to Pascal, everybody has “the intimate perception of this degradation, every time he is not distracted by outside reality. But we do not find in ourselves anything of the kind” (Gouhier, Conversions, 378). And further, “Maine de Biran restores the idea that grace is aimed at freeing the soul imprisoned in its body and not at redeeming the child of Adam … thus he does not define the divine gift in connection with a moral fault whose psychophysiological consequences are transmitted from generation to generation: the rescue from above addresses a natural misery. No matter how far from Rousseau the philosopher is by now, he ignores the Christian tragedy just as much as the Savoyard Vicar” (Gouhier, Conversions, 387).

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4. Atheism and Criterion of Truth People often talk about a scientific aspect, a political aspect, and an ethical aspect of atheism. What is the relationship between them? What is, in the final analysis, the criterion of truth for atheism? I think we can reach some clarity on this point starting from the thesis that has been hitherto presented, which can also be formulated as follows: it is not the refusal of sin that follows the refusal of God but, rather, the opposite; that is, the refusal of sin, of the status naturae lapsae, of the initial Fall, is the beginning of a process that leads to atheism. Hence, atheism can be defined as the will to live consistently the original attitude of rationalism (i.e., as the will to be consistent with the original option). Therefore, it has an essential ethical aspect – namely, the quest for an accord between life and thought. Also in this regard, a study of Marx’s critique of Hegel would be illuminating. It seems to me that this confirms a traditional view of Catholic thought: the essence of rationalism is a gratuitous option in favour of man’s aseity and self-sufficiency. It is not the result of speculative proofs; rather, the proofs are arguments that come after the option, through which it presumes to legitimate itself. People often tightly link the question of the moral aspect to the famous question of the philosophical God and the religious God. Can we say that atheism’s power of seduction lies in its absolute rejection of the philosophical God as a false God? This is Maritain’s view. There is a true God of philosophers who is none but the true God Himself, the God of saints, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, known in His natural attributes only; such a purely rational notion of God is open to the supernatural. But there is also a rational notion of God closed to the supernatural: such is the false God of philosophers, who is just a supreme warranty and justification of the order of nature and of history. It is a God who is responsible for this world without being able to redeem it, a God who consecrates all the good and all the evil of the world, and sacrifices man to the cosmos; such is, essentially, the God of modern rationalist philosophy, which, according to Maritain, had its most complete expression in Hegel’s thought. Against this God, there are two forms of uncompromising protest, that of the saint and that of the atheist. The saint, too, totally refuses things as they are in as much as he views them as intolerable. The saint’s attitude is a total rejection of the false God: in this respect, he is an integral atheist, the most atheistic

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of men; and the fault of the absolute atheist is that he is not perfectly atheistic. Instead of opposing to this false God the power of the true God, he can only fight against the Jupiter of this world by calling to his aid the power of the God immanent in history. Therefore he replaces the true God with devotion to history, thus making himself a servant of history – that is, of the false God again.38 Or, in just slightly different terms: thought closed to the supernatural faces a fork in the road between legitimizing evil and the agonistic position: in it, every form of theological thought must have a legitimizing character, and, consequently, the reaffirmation of the task of human life as a struggle against evil takes the form of atheism. Now, the question seems to me incorrectly posed, precisely because it ignores the terms of the initial option. One may certainly say that a fundamental characteristic of every atheistic philosophy is to presuppose that the victory of the philosophical God over the religious God has already happened, and therefore its critique directly targets the philosophical God. But in another respect we are equally justified in saying that atheism is the refusal of every attempt at compromise and reconciliation between the philosophical God and the religious God, of any philosophy that intends somehow to preserve religion, sublating it, either by presenting itself directly as “Christian philosophy” or as a form of rationalism that wants to affirm the divine freed from all mythologies; and in saying that what specifies atheism is the quest for full consistency in the liberation from the supernatural. Moving on now from the moral aspect to the arguments that atheism always brings with it, politicism and scientism, we ask: Which one of them takes priority? If we look at history, the answer seems to me extremely easy. If we consider historically the transitions from science to scientism, we see that they were consequences of the collapse of spiritualist or Idealist metaphysics, a collapse caused by motivations broadly connected with politics. Thus, the origins of modern atheism, in libertine thought, are concomitant with the atmosphere of the Raison d’état, which generated the impression that religions act in history as tools wielded by politicians. Thus, the appearance of scientism in the properly modern sense in the late 1600s, and its continuation in the 1700s, came after the crisis of Cartesian metaphysics, a crisis that

38 Maritain, La signification, 21 [Range of Reason, 112].

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in my opinion was due to the impossibility of finding in it a foundation to answer the urgent political questions of that time;39 Marxism follows the political impotence of Hegelianism; the political motivation for the formation of the original form of positivism has been well highlighted; methodological positivism in Italy has come into fashion after the crisis of Croce’s and Gentile’s anti-scientism, and it is superfluous to now highlight the political motivations of this crisis. Actually, scientism is, for atheism, always a subsidiary argument; and the true criterion of truth, upon which atheism finds itself forced to rely for lack of evidence, is its ability to provide guidance in concrete historical and political choices. However, be careful: this political aspect must be distinguished from the moral reaction against an unjust social order, even though the two motivations go together in the development of positive atheism. In the final analysis, for an atheist the criterion of truth lies in the recognition that transcendent thought has been surpassed by history – in the sense that one cannot account for the historical process of thought if not by conceiving of it as a development towards more and more rigorous immanence, and in the sense that transcendent thought is powerless to generate efficient political and social forms (i.e., forms not liable to become tools for forces of an entirely different nature). I believe it is easy to answer a final objection from those who assert that absolute atheism is a response to the practical atheism of a certain Christian world. Perhaps they might remark that what has been said, even if it is valid regarding the genesis of philosophical atheism, is not enough to explain its diffusion; that there is a difference, therefore, between the atheism of the teacher and that of the disciples. After what has been said about the criterion of truth, it is clear that the process of the reception of atheism by the common man essentially reproduces its process of formation in the philosopher. With this difference: the philosopher seeks a confirmation of his thesis in the historical actuality, making a free decision whereby human reality, social as well as individual, constitutes itself; the common man, on the contrary, goes from the historical actuality to the atheistic thesis. I think, therefore, that we must say that the greatest inadequacy of today’s religious thought is the lack of a rigorous philosophy of modern

39 See my essay “Cartesio e la politica,” in Rivista di filosofia 41, no. 1 (1950): 3–30.

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and contemporary history – the philosophy of history whence a political philosophy should proceed.

5. Pascal’s Definition of Atheism This schematic investigation of the nature of atheism leads us, it seems to me, to an important conclusion: the fideistic and optative form taken by contemporary atheism, which overcomes the criticisms that could be formulated against it as scientism, establishes the conditions for a full understanding of the thought of Pascal precisely as the first Christian author who explicitly tackled the problem of atheism qua atheismus. Therefore we must reflect on what constitutes his novelty not only with respect to the Port-Royalist doctors but also within tradition in general.40 It lies in the idea that deism is not a stage in the process towards the religious God but, rather, the opposite mistake to that of atheism, which therefore is liable to turn into its opposite. Indeed, consider the very famous fragment 556: Deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism, which is its exact opposite … The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally important to men to know both these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it. The knowledge of only one of these points gives rise either to the pride of  philosophers, who have known God, and not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness, but not the Redeemer. And, as it is alike necessary to man to know these two points, so is it alike merciful of God to have made us know them. The Christian religion does this; it is in this that it consists … All who seek God without Jesus Christ, and who rest in nature, either find no light to satisfy them, or come to form for themselves a means of knowing God and serving Him without a mediator. Thereby they fall either into atheism, or into deism, two things which the Christian religion abhors almost equally.

40 A point perfectly highlighted in the book by Jean Russier, La foi selon Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1949).

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In order to understand it fully, let us refer to the thesis about opposite errors presented in fragment 861: There are then a great number of truths, both of faith and of morality, which seem contradictory, and which all hold good together in a wonderful system. The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some of these truths; and the source of all the objections which the heretics make against us is the ignorance of some of our truths. And it generally happens that, unable to conceive the connection of two opposite truths, and believing that the admission of one involves the exclusion of the other, they adhere to the one, exclude the other, and think of us as opposed to them. Now exclusion is the cause of their heresy; and ignorance that we hold the other truth causes their objections.

This thesis about the alliance of opposites within the truth is the core of Port-Royalist doctrine. Given the importance of the topic, allow me to refer to what Laporte writes in his classic work on Arnauld:41 Properly speaking, and taking them in their positive aspect, there is nothing false and excessive either in the Pelagian theses or in the Protestant theses. Luther and Calvin are completely right to claim that God moves man invincibly, and that justification comes from Faith: does that not agree with the text of St Paul? Pelagians and Jesuits are completely right to say that man is free and merits his salvation by his good works: does that not agree with the Council of Trent? Each of the two sects is not wrong except in rejecting what the other affirms. It bears repeating that in such matters heresy starts by exclusion. As a consequence, orthodoxy here cannot be reduced to an intermediate opinion which, by preserving only fragments of both Protestantism and Molinism, would therefore be doubly heretical. It is only in a higher doctrine, which on this point must complete everything the Protestants affirm with everything the Jesuits affirm, repudiating their mutual negations, it is in the reunification of the two opposite errors – which reunited no longer deserve to be called errors – that Catholic Truth must reside.

Arnauld applied this thesis to the criticism of the opposite errors of the Protestants and the Molinists. Pascal extends it, already in the Entretien avec Monsieur de Saci, to the opposite errors of Epictetus and Montaigne,

41 Jean Laporte, La doctrine de Port-Royal (Paris: PUF, 1923), 18–19.

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and then, in the Pensées, to those of the dogmatics and the skeptics, of the deists and the atheists. This extension cannot be viewed as a mere development because it implies a critique of the rational proofs of the existence of God, which the Port-Royalist doctors did not foresee. According to what could be called Pascal’s typology of worldviews, there is a direction of thought that affirms that “human reason is above everything.”42 This direction must necessarily break into two opposite stances. One is that of those who, starting from a one-sided notion of man’s greatness (which is real), are led to divinize him, the deists: “If they gave you God as an end, it was only to administer to your pride; they made you think that you are by nature like Him, and conformed to Him” (fragment 430). The affirmation of human misery, which is right in itself but just as one-sided, leads to the opposite error, atheism: “And those who saw the absurdity of this claim put you on another precipice, by making you understand that your nature was like that of the brutes, and led you to seek your good in the lusts which are shared by the animals” (ibid.). The two partial truths fail to be reconciled because their advocates have initially left out the truth that “You are not in the state of your creation” (fragment 430). That is, they ignored the fact that “Not all that is incomprehensible ceases to exist” (ibid.): “Original sin is foolishness to men, but it is admitted to be such. You must not then reproach me for the want of reason in this doctrine, since I admit it to be without reason. But this foolishness is wiser than all the wisdom of men, sapientius est hominibus. For without this, what can we say that man is? His whole state depends on this imperceptible point. And how should it be perceived by his reason, since it is a thing against reason, and since reason, far from finding it out by her own ways, is averse to it when it is presented to her?” (fragment 445). Thus, according to Pascal, all worldviews and all moral systems ­organize themselves against the backdrop of an answer to the incomprehensible: there are no absolutely certain, self-evident principles that can be used as a starting point. Nor is it possible to refrain from giving an answer, positive or negative, to the incomprehensible: and so il faut parier. Now, do not these texts – just like the famous assertion that “they”

42 See La vie de Blaise Pascal by his sister Gilberte, in the minor Brunschvicg ­edition, 11.

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(i.e., Socrates and Seneca, and more generally all “philosophers”) “have been in the error that has blinded all men in the beginning: they have all taken death as natural to man”43 – seem to confirm the picture of atheism that I have tried to draw here, starting from a consideration of the meaning of the transition to its postulatory form and of the relationship that gets established in history between forms of metaphysical rationalism and forms of atheism – namely, that atheism is the endpoint of a process that starts from the elevation without proof of man’s present nature to the status of his normal situation? Do not the categories used by Pascal frame the essential forms of philosophical thought because, for him, deism is clearly an ideal category that encompasses all the philosophies that affirm the divine and deny the supernatural? However, the point where Pascal’s position seems exposed to criticism, so that an atheist can make a response, is the identification of atheism with the simple type of negative atheism as a philosophy of man’s misery. Now, won’t the atheist’s response be to attempt to show that this misery is not an ineliminable aspect of the human condition but, rather, the force that can give rise to a new order that contains “the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution”?44 Won’t his response be, in other words, that the odyssey of history must lead to “total man,” meaning man who is pure greatness, divinized man, man now master of his destiny? Is this response conclusive? In the next essay we will discuss how contemporary atheism must encounter the Pascal problem and how it finds itself obliged to recognize it as the central question in the history of philosophy. ***

43 “Letter to Madame Périer and Her Husband, on the Death of M. Pascal Père,” in Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works, The Harvard Classics, vol. 48 (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1910), 337. 44 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk Struik, trans. M. Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 135.

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The author has communicated that he would no longer argue the distinction between negative atheism and positive atheism in the terms he defined it in this essay (page 288) – namely, that the endpoint of negative atheism is Sade and that of positive atheism is Marx.45 In fact, the study – which so far has not been conducted in full – of the process of thought from Sade to Surrealism in terms of history of philosophy leads one to recognize in the Surrealist endpoint (as manifested theoretically in the work of André Breton) a form of positive atheism. Like Marxism, Surrealism intends to represent the fullness of the revolutionary idea in its primary aspect, that of intending to be a radical break with the past and the beginning of a new history. It is defined, therefore, by the intention to create a new reality in which humanity, by recovering what it had projected outside of itself by creating God (the powers that it had “alienated” from itself), will supposedly achieve the fullness of its power. Hence the essential phraseology of positive atheism: total man, super-humanity, surreality, and so on. These words, even if they are used by different authors, are very similar in their essential meaning. It is also true, however, that Surrealism – in the course of its effort to preserve the purity and the integrity of the revolutionary idea against the dangers of a historical involution of Marxism – tends to give the idea of negativity a magical character, as if it could be the source of the creation of the new reality; and to end in the most radical form of nihilism, or in pure anarchism – that is, anarchism dissociated from the moral character that old anarchism still maintained (as has been seen in the result, in the recent sketch of a psycho-erotic-Marxist revolution based on the Sade-Marx-Freud mix, which is exactly the obligatory core of Surrealist thought). It is nonetheless true that the reciprocal criticisms that Surrealism and Marxism direct at each other are equally valid and that they serve the purpose of highlighting the contradiction inside the idea of total revolution. The Author intends to examine this point more deeply in future research. Conversely, the term “negative atheism” must be used in reference to pessimistic atheism, founded not on the idea of a possible radical change of the human condition but, rather, on its complete

45 [TN] These comments by Del Noce were added to the 1970 edition of Il Problema dell’Ateismo.

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immutability. However, this form of thought goes through a cycle that leads it to progressively shed its atheistic character and to reconcile with religious thought. In the Author’s judgment, the thought of Simone Weil represents the climax of this process.46

46 Regarding the study of the necessary development of pessimism in a religious direction, the Author takes the liberty to refer the reader to the following works of his: “Martinetti nella cultura europea, italiana e piemontese”; “Giuseppe Rensi tra Leopardi e Pascal, ovvero l’autocritica dell’ateismo negativo in Giuseppe Rensi,” in Atti della Giornata Rensiana (Milan: Marzorati, 1967); “Simone Weil, interprete del mondo di oggi,” the introduction to Simone Weil, L’amore di Dio (Turin: Borla, 1968), later republished in L’epoca della secolarizzazione (Milan: Giuffrè, 1970) [“Simone Weil, Interpreter of Today’s World,” in The Age of Secularization, 118–52].

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1. LUCIEN GOLDMANN’S MARXIST “PARI” In the preceding essay I arrived at proposing two theses: (1) that the transition from scientistic atheism to postulatory atheism leads us to rediscover Pascal’s relevance today and the truth of his definition of atheism; and (2) that Marx’s philosophy can be viewed as apparently the most adequate response to the Pascalian consideration of atheism. Now we have to prove that the clash between Pascal and Marx presents itself as necessary at the end of the critique of the scholastic and scientistic form of Marxism. The proof is quite easy because this process of thought has been followed all the way to its conclusion by Lucien Goldmann, who claims that Pascal has been surpassed in Marx.1 First of all, I will describe the essential features of this process, observing that it took place starting from an interpretation of Marx that at bottom is identical to the one I had proposed in the second essay of this collection, without thinking directly of Pascal at that time.

1 Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) [The Hidden God, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Verso, 2016)]. See also the essay “Le pari: est-il écrit ‘pour le libertin?’” in the first of the Cahiers de Royaumont, titled Blaise Pascal: L’homme et l’ouvre (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1956) and also in Recherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 169ff. According to Goldmann, the tragic vision is a scheme that applies to a broad set of philosophical, literary, and artistic works. He studied it in connection with Kant, Pascal, and Racine. As far as philosophy is concerned, Pascal and Kant are the authors to whom he thinks it is applicable.

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I had said then that both the metaphysicalist and the revisionist interpretations, in its many forms, originate from a shared neglect of Marx’s critique of speculative philosophy and, thus, of his surpassing philosophy in the usual sense of autonomous conceptual discourse. Let us now see how Goldmann’s study, of course without being influenced in the least by that work of mine, nonetheless draws its ultimate conclusion, which was not clear to me at the time. In his judgment, in reference to Marxism one cannot speak of an objective sociology in the sense of a systematic ensemble of judgments of fact independent of the judgments of value – in short, in the sense of a science with respect to which politics would play the role of the consequent technique. On the other hand, one cannot say either that Marxism accepts ethics, conceived as an ensemble of values that are affirmed as valid independently of the structure of empirical reality, as a benchmark whose necessary realization is subsequently verified by economic science. So that in Marxism there would be two perspectives, the moral one, which contains the condemnation of capitalism, and the economic and historic one, which contains the arguments that aim to prove that capitalism is condemned by reality itself. At the end of the last century and at the beginning of ours, these two terms, Marx’s ethics and his sociology, which separate the theoretical and the practical aspect of his thought, had led socialist thought to interfere in the famous discussions concerning the distinction between (scientific) judgments of fact and judgments of value; and it was precisely concerning this point that the crisis of Marxism took place (in the Western world, this eclipse reached its climax in the years between 1920 and 1930). People said: from premises in the indicative mood derived from judgments of fact one cannot draw any conclusion in the imperative mood; morality cannot be founded on science.2 This resulted in the opposition 2 Regarding this distinction between judgments of value and judgments of fact, and the consequent impossibility of founding morality on science, see, for example, the purely ethical definition of socialism given by the greatest Italian moralist from the neo-Kantian, positivist period of our philosophical culture – Erminio Juvalta. He defined it as the political orientation in which “justice is the establishment of social conditions such that each individual finds in them the same external possibility of having value as a person (which coincides with the most universally radical interpretation of the famous second formula of Kant’s Groundwork)” (in the volume Il vecchio e il nuovo problema della morale [Bologna: Zanichelli, 1914], reprinted in I limiti del razionalismo etico [Turin: Einaudi, 1945], 320).

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between Marxist orthodoxism and revisionism, the non-critical appearance of orthodoxism and, on the other hand, the end of Marxism in revisionism, and then the end of revisionism itself.3 What Marxism is about is, instead, a total attitude that spans in an organic unity the comprehension of social reality, the value that judges it, and the action that transforms it. What shall we call this total attitude? The only suitable word to describe it is “faith” since no other word expresses so precisely the foundation of values in reality and the differentiated and hierarchical character of every reality with respect to the values. For sure, the object of such faith no longer has any supernatural or supra-historical character. It is merely supra-individual, in the sense that it is faith in a historical future that we must create through our action. Already here a peculiar similarity with Augustinism is visible: values are founded on an objective reality that cannot be known absolutely but only relatively – that is, God for St Augustine, History for Marx – and the most objective possible knowledge that man can attain of a historical fact presupposes the recognition of such transcendent or supra-individual reality as the supreme value.4 A future that we must create through our action: having discarded the conception that believes in historical necessity, which cannot withstand the objection that judgments of value cannot be deduced from judgments of fact, Marxism adopts the idea of the pari, making it the centre of its thought. Since certainty about a historical future cannot take the form of simple certainty about an irrevocable fate, the structure of Marxist thought takes on an appearance that is curiously similar to that of Pascal’s thought. On the one side, the psychological and moral arguments that conclude in “we must choose between socialism and barbarism”; on the other side the quest, “after making the pari, for all the objective reasons to fortify the hope that lies at the foundation of this pari. This is what explains, in Pascal, the discussions about Miracles,

3 The final act is, as is well known, Croce’s philosophy. I believe this vision of history due to Gramsci could also be reached starting from Goldmann’s perspective. A common trait of revisionism, yesterday like today, is to detach Marx from Hegel, generally in order to bring him closer to Kant. Thus, in Croce the end of revisionism coincides with his rediscovery of Hegel, but Hegel separated from what led to Marx, and already ready to be purified of his theologism through an interpretation linked with Croce’s very particular reading of Vico. 4 [TN] This paragraph is a loose quotation of Goldmann, Hidden God, 90ff.

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Prophecies, Scripture etcetera, just like in the Marxists it explains the great historical analyses, rigorous and detailed, which establish the great likelihood of the future victory of Socialism.”5 Repeating a formula from Ernst Bloch, Goldmann defines Marxism as learned hope, hope that is conscious of its reasons for hope. Here it is necessary that I correct a thesis that I had proposed in my early Marxist writings. Back then I was mesmerized by the formula that describes Marxism as “moral Galileism,” which was in the air at that time and which I was one of the very first people to use; accordingly, I wrote that, for Marxism, philosophies are merely historical working hypotheses that are verified experimentally by the operations to which they give rise. Today I view this thesis as still subordinate to scientism, and I find it corrected by Goldmann with arguments that I consider decisive. Indeed, a scientific hypothesis has a purely theoretical character, to which practice is linked only in a mediated fashion, through technical application. Whereas the character of the philosophical and revolutionary pari is simultaneously theoretical and practical. Moreover, this pari contains an element of finality that is entirely absent in scientific hypotheses.6 A curious thing is that, in the very act of somehow reconnecting itself to a theological tradition (Augustinism and Pascal), Marxism separates itself completely from whatever was still theological in the philosophy of history. This theologism manifested itself in the fact that the existence of progress and its continuation in the future were presented as set by fate. Instead, the introduction of the pari corresponds to the idea that the two fundamental values, progress and socialism, are tied to our action. We can even say: by this statement Marxism escapes the neo-Enlightenment critique, which tends to distinguish within it an eschatological aspect, originating in Hegel, and a positive aspect, which makes it a further stage in the development of the Enlightenment. Instead, it presents itself as the coincidence of the radical fulfilment of the process of thought that started with Hegel and of the fullness of the Enlightenment, understood as anti-theological philosophy of the Revolution – as affirmation of an active reason, capable 5 Goldmann, “Le pari,” 130–1. On another occasion I said, using a formula quite similar to those employed by Goldmann, that the specific feature of Marx’s philosophy is that it expresses itself not in the awareness of a realized totality but in the realization of a totality. 6 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 100 [Hidden God, 91].

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of transforming the world. In this coincidence, Hegelianism, freed from its theological aspects (which coincide with the Idealist and Platonic aspects), in turn frees the Enlightenment from iusnaturalism, thereby creating the conditions for a revolution that is no longer just “partial” or “political” but “total” or “social.” However, by the very fact that it fully realizes Hegelianism and the Enlightenment, Marxism supposedly positions itself beyond both of them. So, Marxist thought has a postulatory aspect, in a vision in which God is replaced by the historical future and his City by the “Totality”; and accordingly it has an entirely different historical vision. Scientistic Marxism had to invoke the tradition of eighteenth-century materialism, attributing absolutely disproportionate value to figures like Holbach or Helvetius.7 Goldmann’s Marxism – in which I am inclined to recognize, at least in his proposals, the rigorous form of a critical Marxism, capable of starting a dialogue with Western thought – must emphasize continuity and a certain recovery of the Augustinian tradition, after and against Thomistic and Cartesian rationalism, while affirming its own atheistic character. We have three stages of development: in Augustinianism, the values of knowledge are founded in an objective reality (God) of whose existence we are certain (let us call this the ontologistic aspect of Augustinianism, in a generic sense, whereby Ontologism is opposed to cosmologism); in Pascal, this certainty of existence is replaced by the pari regarding the existence of a supernatural God, independent of any human will, who is not amenable to demonstration (the “hidden God” – let us call this the eclipse of the ontologistic aspect of the Augustinian tradition); in Marxism, what gets affirmed is the pari on a future that our own action has to create.8 We understand the extreme importance that the question of the history of philosophy takes for Marxism interpreted in this way: the only criterion it can use to manifest its (relative, because historical) truth is that of 7 See, for example, P. Naville, the most scientistic among contemporary French Marxists, Paul Thiry d’Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1943); or, also, the exaggerations in the well-known book by A. Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1953). This interpretation refers to a wellknown chapter by Marx in The Holy Family (whose thesis, which is of a polemical nature, was made rigid in dogmatic Marxism à la Plekhanov). By contrast, Goldmann’s perspective seems to confirm my thesis that there is no transition from negative atheism to positive atheism and vice versa. 8 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 99 [Hidden God, 90–1].

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being able to situate, surpassing them and integrating them, other worldviews, which in turn are incapable of fulfilling this task. Of course, the confirmation coming from the history of philosophy cannot guarantee that the reality that Marxism envisions will necessarily be actualized, given that such actualization is tied to our action. But without the confirmation from the history of philosophy, Marxist hope would cease to be “learned.” Here some clarifications are necessary concerning the concept of history of philosophy and how it is interpreted by this author. Evidently, it is not a matter – at least in Goldmann’s intentions and whether or not he fully achieves his goal – of giving it a theological meaning, albeit secularized, through the idea that history has a meaning that transcends history: Dialectical materialism embodies and comprehends itself as a moment in universal history, and a moment which this history will necessarily transcend and outgrow. If, however – like all classical thought – it states that there is such a thing as human nature, and that this lies in man’s ability to go beyond the present situation by acting upon it, then it can avoid any incoherence by giving the notion of progress a relative content which situates every historical period only by its relationship to other past epochs and to the present day. It thus removes the only difficult problem, that of an “end of history” as something which, in the present state of our knowledge, we can never grasp. It is this which constitutes one of the main superiorities of Marxist over Hegelian thought, which tried to be Philosophy in an absolute and not merely in a relative sense.”9

To put it differently, for Marxism there is progress in the content of truth, and for Goldmann its historical pattern is the irreversible relationship of integrating and surpassing that occurs between rationalist or empiricist individualism and the tragic vision, and between the tragic vision and dialectic thought. Let us also add, of course, that for Marxism the history of philosophy cannot be autonomous since every world vision is the vision that a social class forms in a certain age. Without addressing the question of the concept of the history of philosophy (of its relations with the philosophy of history and with its

9 Ibid., 240 [Hidden God, 214].

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theological presuppositions; of how philosophies are tied to social classes; and so on), let us see how Goldmann actually sees the history of modern philosophy. He starts from the idea that human facts always constitute global significant structures,10 which have simultaneously a practical, theoretical, and affective character; and that consequently in the history of philosophy one needs to use the notion of world vision, which is not an immediate empirical datum but an indispensable conceptual tool, in order to distinguish what is essential from what is accidental in a piece of work.11 Or, as he also says, one needs to use the idea of totality, whereby the parts cannot be understood except by knowing the whole they belong to, and, conversely, the whole cannot be understood except by knowing the parts and their relationships. A text must be integrated in larger and larger significant wholes – that is, in the work of which it is part; in the complete body of works by the author; in the wholes of the literary, philosophical, and religious trends of the age and country in which it was written; and, finally, in the whole social, economic, and political life.12 As you can see, this concept of “significant structure” (I prefer to use this expression rather than “world vision,” which is too generic, and rather than “totality,” which is too closely tied to Marxist language) by itself is not at all specifically Marxist; and, more important, it is in my view perfectly correct. But let us see how Goldmann uses it. In the historical process of modern philosophy he distinguishes a first world vision characterized by the fact that “it had destroyed the two closely connected ideas of the community and the universe, and had replaced them by the totally different concepts of the isolated individual and of infinite space.”13 In this vision – namely, rationalism, a generic term that, according to Goldmann, applies also to empiricist philosophies – God becomes a synonym for “order,” “eternal truths,” the guarantee of an instrumental world accessible by the individual’s thought and action. It is a God “present to the soul,” as in Augustinism; but his

10 [TN] Strutture significative in the original, where “significativo” (like “significant” in English) is normally used to express the property of being “important” or “meaningful” but here should probably be understood more in the sense of “signifying.” 11 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 7ff, 24ff [Hidden God, 6ff, 22ff]. 12 Goldmann, “Le pari,” 111–12. 13 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 37ff [Hidden God, 27ff].

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function is reduced to that of guaranteeing to the individual the rationality and thus availability of the world in which he will unfold his ­powers. The individual is central, and therefore the values that transcend him are denied, and therefore rationalism is essentially a-moral and a-religious. The great philosophers of rationalism, Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz, were still sincere believers and talked about morality and religion. But they poured into these ancient forms, in connection with their new world vision, an entirely new content. Let us consider, for instance, the transition from the believer Descartes to the very pious Malebranche. There was still a theme that could seem to establish a kinship between Descartes’s thought and the presence of God of earlier philosophy, namely the theme of the arbitrary creation of eternal truths. It is exactly Malebranche who eliminates it and makes God’s will dependent on an order that precedes the creation of the world. There are no longer particular acts of will on God’s part, but grace becomes integrated in the rational system of occasional causes. Therefore it is Spinoza who draws the final consequences of this new content by dispensing with creation.14 Nor is there any room in rationalism for a true morality. It speaks of happiness and wisdom, terms that refer to criteria like success and defeat, knowledge and error, but not to good and evil. In brief, in rationalism “God, deprived of the physical universe and of the conscience of man, the only two instruments by which He had been capable of communicating with man, departed from the world where He could no longer speak.”15 Here lies the possibility of the transition to the tragic vision. This vision opposes itself to rationalism in its a-moral and a-religious character; therefore, it is, first of all, the affirmation of a set of values that transcends the individual; and yet, it does not express itself as a form capable of replacing the atomistic and mechanic world of individualistic rationalism because it lacks historical perspective; to be more precise, because its temporal dimension is the present and not the future. Thus, the world of rationalism is fixed as definitive and unchangeable; one simply opposes to it a new scale of values. It is easy to derive from this first characteristic of the tragic vision all the others. There is the affirmation that values are authentic and, 14 Ibid., 40 [30]. This assessment of Spinoza, viewed as the endpoint of Cartesian rationalism, shows to what extent Marxism’s historical vision is still traditional. 15 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 41 [Hidden God, 31].

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therefore, that they need to be realized, but at the same time there is the awareness that they are rigorously unrealizable. Hence the paradoxical situation of the tragic man who lives exclusively for the realization of rigorously unrealizable values; with the corollary “all or nothing,” the lack of degrees, the complete absence of relativity.16 This is why the “hidden God,” always present and always absent, is essential for the tragic vision. Thus, while his presence takes all value and reality from the world, his equally absolute and permanent absence makes the world into the only reality which man can confront, the only sphere in and against which he can and must apply his demand for substantial and absolute values. Many forms of religious and revolutionary consciousness have insisted upon the incompatibility between God and the world and between values and reality. Most of them, however, have admitted some possible solution, if only that of an endeavour which can be made in this world to achieve these values, or, alternatively, of the possibility for man of abandoning this world entirely and seeking refuge in the intelligible and transcendent world of values or of God. In its most radical form, tragedy rejects both these solutions as signs of weakness and illusion, and sees them as being either conscious or unconscious attempts at compromise. For tragedy believes neither that the world can be changed and authentic values realized within the framework it provides nor that it can simply be left behind while man seeks refuge in the city of God. This is why tragic man cannot try to spend his wealth or fulfil his duties in the world “well,” nor pass over these duties and abandon his wealth completely. Here, as elsewhere, tragic man can find only one valid attitude: that of saying both “Yes” and “No,” of being in the world but not of the world, as “taking neither love nor care for the things which it contains.” Living in this world means accepting, in the full sense of the word that it exists; being in it without being of it means refusing to accept that it has any real existence … The absence of God deprives tragic man of any right to remain ignorant of the world or to turn his face from it; his refusal remains within the world, both because it is this world that he rejects and because it is only by this movement of rejection that tragic man can know himself and understand his own limits and value.17

16 Ibid., 71–2 [62–3]. 17 Ibid., 60–1 [50–2].

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The world is dumb and God is hidden; thus the cosmological argument and the ontological argument for the existence of God fail. Of God there cannot be any theoretical certainty; therefore, one moves to the “order of the heart,” the “primacy of morality,” the pari. Values are rigorously impossible to realize; hence, the solitude of the tragic man, to whom only one form of expression is allowed, the monologue, or, more exactly, since it is a monologue addressed to God, the “solitary dialogue.” The Pensées must be regarded as “a supreme example of one of those ‘solitary dialogues’ with the hidden God of the Jansenists and of tragedy.”18 Uncertainty and paradox (i.e., the union of opposites, which is essential, as we have seen, for the tragic vision) are pushed by Pascal to their ultimate consequences. In this sense, his thought is the extremization of Jansenism, not just beyond Arnauld and Nicole but beyond Barcos. All the way to God himself. The correlate at the level of knowledge of the presence and absence of the hidden God is the paradoxical union of certainty and uncertainty, of hope and risk that is proper to the pari. Believing is nothing else but parier; in Pascal’s faith, the possibility of God’s non-existence is maintained as a continuously present and continuously denied possibility. To the Jansenist idea that God’s will is hidden, Pascal adds the idea that his existence is hidden. “For Jansenism, in general, God’s existence was a certainty and individual salvation a hope. Pascal’s wager extends the idea of hope to the very existence of God, and thereby becomes profoundly different from the view of Arnauld and Barcos. But this is not because Pascal escapes from Jansenism, but because, on the contrary, he carries it to its logical conclusions.”19 In short, parier is to make hope the fundamental category of existence. Certainly the tragic vision turns out to be very accommodating when it lets the dialectic vision surpass it. It loses all power of resistance as soon as the category of the future is introduced. It cannot reaffirm its theism because its appeal to a transcendent being is just a structural feature due to its being static; due to the negation of every possibility not only of realizing values but of approximating them. In Goldmann’s interpretation, Pascal’s wager has features that lend themselves all too evidently

18 Ibid., 76–7 [68]. 19 Ibid., 330 [297].

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to letting it be surpassed in the Marxist pari. In fact, according to the latter there is no longer any difference between faith and hope since faith is nothing but the docta spes. However, Pascal’s pari is not on the future but on the eternal, and the difference between faith and hope matters. The conversion of the tragic thinker to dialectic philosophy is quite easy to achieve: it suffices to show him that values are realizable, and then he can no longer put up any resistance, precisely because he has formulated the question of God not in terms of reality but in terms of value. It is enough that men “begin to consider society from the point of view of the future, and thereby make possible the development of a genuine philosophy of history,”20 and the focus of hope will shift.

2. THE STANDARD SECULAR VISION OF THE HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY Goldmann’s book has its place in the literature about Pascal, and another place, much more important because of the questions it raises, in the general interpretation of the historical process of modern philosophy. It is this second aspect that I would like to discuss now, focusing on the connection between introducing the consideration of atheism as a position that has not been surpassed by the philosophies of divine immanence, and the necessity to problematize the history of philosophy and its periodization schemes. Since it is impossible to include a complete proof within the limited length of this essay, I will try to outline exactly how introducing the methodological tool “significant structure,” in reference to the thought of Descartes and Pascal, must lead to a view of seventeenth-century philosophy that is quite different from that affirmed by Goldmann and, at the same time, very far from the traditional one, such that the question of the whole vision of the development of modern philosophy is involved. In the initial pages of this book, I talked about how today visions of the history of philosophy are fundamentally important in determining even theoretical orientations and how the vision of the development of modern philosophy is extremely relevant in this regard. You might reply that every vision of the history of philosophy is always relative to a philosophy. So I have to demonstrate that the concept of “modern

20 [TN] Goldmann, The Hidden God, 282. I slightly extended the quote for clarity.

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philosophy” actually reflects obligatory objective data, which any philosophy must take into account. I will begin by presenting the features of the current secular view in order to identify its essential traits; then I will show the datum that is obligatory and unquestionable even for a vision that intends to criticize the “secular character of modern philosophy”; finally, I will point out what separates Goldmann’s interpretation from other rationalistic visions. With a most strenuous effort, I will limit my presentation to ten pages, while trying not to leave out anything essential. So let us consider the meaning of the word “modern” as it presents itself, applied to philosophy, in the habitual usage. We can say that people regard as modern, in the most elementary sense, every philosophy that presents itself as not merely explicating a “virtuality” – in the rigorous sense of this word, which distinguishes it from mere analytic derivation – of ancient and Christian thought; and that is led by this to affirm, when it places itself in history, the existence of a period of philosophical research marked by a break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods, which are thought to be “concluded.” What is the nature of the break? The usual answer is so familiar that one is embarrassed to write it down one more time: the modern is born with the acquisition of the awareness that reason has its own structure, which cannot be bent to serve a form of knowledge that does not originate from it; when, therefore, reason becomes the supreme tribunal against which all others must be measured. Maturity is contrasted to childhood, criticism is contrasted to myth, and so on. Modern philosophy presents itself as absolute rationalism in the sense of a radical refusal of the supernatural but as rationalism that has appropriated the Christian truth of the real distinction between man and nature (of man’s transcendence with respect to nature, of human negativity, and similar formulas). And that therefore, as rationalism dissociated from naturalism, is not susceptible to turning into skepticism. This is why it fights against two fundamental positions: naturalistic metaphysics and its skeptical inversion, and religious transcendence and its expressions both in scholastic and in mystic form. These negations coincide with the criticist negations of skepticism and dogmatism so that the development of the critical spirit and of the secular spirit supposedly coincide. Moreover, since its period is thought to be not yet concluded, the determination of the “character of modern philosophy” takes on the meaning of an ideal to be realized rather than the result of a consideration of

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history. Shall we look for the expression of this secularity in a new metaphysics, in which liberation from naturalistic objectivism coincides with a restoration of the divine in terms of immanence, or shall the criticism of myth extend to the metaphysical type of knowledge? These are the two ways of picturing the “modern,” that of Romanticism and that of the Enlightenment. Let us now omit the reasons why the latest secularism has come to think that the only way to interpret the current crisis as a mere developmental stage within modernity understood as progress is by going back to the Enlightenment; and has come to identify the type of modernity with the man of the Enlightenment, in what distinguishes him from the Romantic man (who is concerned about continuity with the past, via a modern metaphysics that forms a continuous theological line with the metaphysics of the past, albeit through the break) and from the libertine; and, all the more, of course, from their union (the decadent man). Let us take for granted already this “end of Romanticism” in the sphere of secular awareness. Now, what is the “tune” that specifies the Enlightenment in the history of the rationalist spirit? If we consider such history from the twelfth to the seventeenth century (i.e., from the Averroists to the libertines), we observe a clear continuity: irreligion always presents itself as a return to ancient science and wisdom, as opposition to Christianity in the name of the cyclical conception of time that belonged to Hellenism. Now, between this rationalism that ends in libertinism and the rationalism that begins with the Enlightenment there is a sharp break, in the sense that the Enlightenment appropriates the Christian sense of time, symbolized by an ascending line; thus, in reference to it we can speak of a position ulterior to Christianity, or of secularism in the proper sense. Modern rationalism begins when the spiritual type that libertinism had given rise to – the erudite turned towards the past, who is not deceived by today’s impostures because he recognizes that they are essentially identical to those of yore – is replaced by the type of the enlightened philosopher turned towards the future, towards a humanity freed from mythologies and superstitions. It begins when the thesis of the double truth, one for the learned and one for the plebs, which was essential for the first type of rationalism, gives way to the idea of building the future city, when the model of the political philosopher reappears, no longer in utopian form. Nineteenth-century historiography had searched for the beginnings of the modern spirit in all the rebellions against the medieval ideal,

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which it loved to depict as a radical negation of this world in favour of the other. By using clichés like “discovery of man,” “discovery of nature,” and so on, which philosophy could not be made a moment in the transition from transcendence to immanence? Neo-Enlightenment historiography, in light of the distinctions I described, can only recognize the beginning of modern thought in the area of the new science: when the metaphysical-contemplative ideal of knowledge was replaced by the scientific-operative one (to transform, to humanize the world). Certainly, such a scientific ideal could not have established itself without the Christian discovery of man’s transcendence with respect to nature; therefore, there is no modern spirit, yet, when the crisis of the supernatural is associated with a return to an ancient type of rationalism. But, on the other hand, the Christian anthropology presupposed by this science is surpassed since it is completely secularized. In brief, the modern begins when the idea of a renovatio (it is not a coincidence that a large portion of the metaphors employed by Bacon and Descartes are inspired by the idea of a second birth) parts ways with the idea of a return to classical antiquity as well as to primitive Christianity. Or again: the inversion of humanism into erudite libertinism had coincided with the loss of the idea of renovatio. The modern is the reaffirmation of that idea freed from the idea of return. For sure, the initial, purely historical definition from which we started applies, besides to secular philosophies, to other philosophies that have a Christian intention in the transcendent sense. As a matter of fact, the modern is constantly and necessarily accompanied, as if by its shadow, by modernism. By “modernism” I now mean the illusion whereby this or that development of modern thought is interpreted as the occasion to realize the “Christian philosophy by essence and not by accident,”21 whose precondition is supposedly the rejection of the medieval compromise between ancient thought and Christianity. And the seventeenth century is expressly the century of modernisms in the sense that all the future forms of Catholic modernism are present in it (in Leibniz and Vico we already see the traits of a different historical perspective: something has been lost in the philosophy that broke with tradition; among 21 Clearly, I am speaking of modernism in a sense unrelated to the modernism of the beginning of our century (or of today). Or better, it has a distant relationship because, for secular historians, every attempt at a modern Christian philosophy must end, when carried to its ultimate consequences, in a break with Catholic orthodoxy.

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many others, we also find the germs of future reactionary Romanticism). The question of the genesis of modernism seems fairly simple, and so does the question of organizing its forms into types. Every stage of the development of secular thought cannot but break with a previous secular position. Thus, the new science breaks with the Scholastics and also with the thought of the Renaissance. Mistaking this secondary adversary for the primary and essential one is what originates modernisms; which, precisely because of this origin, are unable – and this confirms their illusion – to establish a continuity with the earlier tradition of Christian religious thought. At the lowest level there is the “Mersenne illusion,”22 which is naïve but not naïve enough not to reoccur constantly (even today) on the occasion of particular developments of scientific thought. In the form this illusion took in Mersenne, the new science has an apologetic significance in as much as it is a break with magical thought. This latter, in order to deny the miracle, naturalized it, and in order to do so had to deny the reality of natural laws; physics based on laws will be much easier to reconcile with the existence of miracles since they can only be presented as exceptions to stable natural laws. The new science must also break with naturalistic metaphysics; corresponding to this break there is the Christian interpretation of the “Idealism of knowledge,” which supposedly makes possible a philosophy that fulfills the scholastic requirement of the preambula fidei, while simultaneously realizing the Christian character of being a “philosophy of interiority.” Idealism must be joined with personalism in order not to turn into naturalism: in the 1600s this is the Malebranche type, and it is also what later will be the Rosmini type. A third type, finally, is the recognition of the contradiction between modern thought and Christianity, albeit maintaining the modern idea of reason and the condemnation of returns,23 that is, the Pascal type, what later will be the Kierkegaard type: a growing denunciation of the delusions of “Christian philosophies.” In the centuries after the 1600s, each one of these forms would be left behind: in the 1700s, the idea of the “Christian scientist”; in the 1800s, the formulation of Idealism in terms of a Christian philosophy

22 See the splendid book by R. Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme (Paris: Vrin, 1943). 23 Or affirming a return, going back past Augustinianism itself, to pure biblical thought.

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open to the transcendent; in the 1900s, the last line of defence in terms of existential thought. Next to the idea that modern philosophy is secular, there is the complementary idea that the Counter-Reformation had a practical nature, as definitively formulated by Croce. Recall: What was defended by that movement … was a historically given institution, without going back, as the Renaissance and the Reformation had done, to mankind’s eternal sources in order to create new thoughts and new spiritual and moral attitudes. The Counter-Reformation picked up what it needed and what benefited it, everywhere: from humanism, classical culture; from the politicians of the Renaissance, the raison d’État and the prudential arts; also from the ideals of the Renaissance, the care of worldly things and practical industry, preferred to contemplative life; from the Reformation, the needed correction in customs and in ecclesiastical discipline; and so on. It brought only one contribution of its own, as a directing and cohesive element: shrewdness … The intrinsically political nature of its work, which subordinated ­everything to the goal to be attained, explains the intellectual and moral aridity that accompanied it … [I]t lacked moral inventiveness, the ability to create new and progressive forms of ethical life.24

This is, in very general outline, the most common secular interpretation today. As a confirmation, let us consider the famous article that a renowned historian who represents the type of the pure rationalist (i.e., the non-dialectic rationalist, in the sense used by Goldmann), Émile Bréhier, wrote as a sort of conclusion to his history of philosophy, “Y a-t-il une philosophie Chrétienne?”25 Let us look especially at what he writes about modern philosophy. In his judgment, in the 1600s an 24 Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 15–17 [TN: my translation]. Notice that this historical conception is, or was until a few years ago, generally the most accepted: by secular people of all orientations, by Protestants, and, among Catholics, by modernists (see “modernism” as “archaism” in Buonaiuti). Regarding Marxists, see, for example, Henri Lefebvre, Pascal, 2 vols. (Paris: Nagel, 1949–54), a book that can be of some interest in helping one to understand its author’s (a former student of Blondel) progress towards Marxism, but for no other reason. 25 In Revue de métaphysique et de morale 38, no. 2 (1931): 133–62. The quotations are found on pages 151, 157, 159, and 161. The fact that the reference to Feuerbach is not accompanied by any mention of Marx is significant in understanding the author’s brand of rationalism.

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attempt was made to synthesize faith and rationalism, in which Christians claimed to turn the weapon of reason against the libertines and “wanted reason, consulted impartially, to get to establish … the fundamental truths of Christianity.” As far as intentions are concerned, the Descartes of the Meditations can also be included in this attempt. But Pascal was not deceived about the apologetic meaning of this quest, and the Enlightenment confirmed his judgment, understanding the true spirit of the Cartesian opus, in which metaphysics is only one part of a larger picture oriented towards physics and towards practice. In the nineteenth century, the Restoration went hand in hand with a Christian philosophy that took the form of a sociology of order, traditionalism; but its true outcome was Comte’s positivism, which “re-established all the social values of Catholicism (meaning by social value its unifying power) without preserving anything of its dogma.” Hegel made an attempt at Christian philosophy, but “just like the Christianity of De Maistre and Bonald concludes in Comte’s sociocracy, Hegel’s philosophy concludes in that of Feuerbach. From De Maistre’s Christianity, Comte keeps the idea of the social necessity of a dogma that unifies the spirits. From Hegelianism, Feuerbach keeps the idea of the infinite potency that lies in man, and contains within itself the immanent reason of all its manifestations throughout history.” More recently, there was Blondel’s attempt, but “it is a matter of apologetics and not of philosophy; it is a matter of introducing and defending Christian doctrine, regarded as proven and verified in other ways, and even of making it desirable. But these benefits are not arguments in its favor; why should we believe that reality is such that our ‘deep will’ must be satisfied?” If he had been more of an expert in Italian philosophy, Bréhier could have also talked about the history of Vichianism until Croce and of the transition from Gioberti and, in a sense, from Blondel to Gentile. There is no point, after all, in multiplying the examples. Who has not heard again and again that Leibniz is interesting because of his methodological innovations, like the distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact, the principle of sufficient reason, the law of the indiscernibles, the theory of small perceptions, and so on rather than his theodicy, the theory of eternal truths, or that of pre-established harmony? Or that Vico is interesting because of his founding of the sciences of the human world, the interpretation of myths and ancient fables, the investigation of primitive societies and so on rather than his metaphysics? That these Christian thinkers of the 1600s have two faces,

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one turned to the future and one to the past, and thus conjoined their effective investigations with antiquated attempts to construct a system in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation? And that, in fact, these attempts were hardly persuasive in their own epoch, given that all of them, Descartes and Malebranche, Leibniz and Vico, died in isolation? On the other hand, who does not know works that for a long time were regarded as classics, like Brunschvicg’s studies of Descartes, Russell’s of Leibniz, Croce’s of Vico, all directed at extracting the living aspect out of the artificial construction? The questions that matter are, instead: (1) What is the significance of this view in determining theoretical orientations themselves? (2) Why until now, in effect, has this view not been problematized? and (3) In what sense is it problematizable, and what reasons today make this problematization necessary? About the first question, I believe we must say that today, after historicism and neo-positivism and the critique of evidences, the fundamental argument that every kind of secularism can bring up in its favour is precisely this: the existence of a historical fact that is, at the same time, a “philosophical fact,” namely, a world and a thought posterior to the breaking up of Christendom or to the facts that accompanied it chronologically – the broadening of the historical and geographical horizon and the collapse of the Mediterranean-centred world, the Copernican revolution of the new science – which can only be explained as a process towards the radical denial of transcendence in a religious sense. It is not hard to show, for instance, that in neo-positivism there is still, implicit, the conviction of the truth of Comte’s theory of three stages, which is in fact the true soul of positivism (and not the scientific spirit); and it is not hard to show that, if the investigations promoted by neopositivism are separated from this conviction, they are amenable to taking another meaning. You will say: this observation may be valid in reference to the philosophy of history and its theological substructure; in reference to the attempts by both Hegel and Comte to establish a meaning and an ultimate end of history, to repeat, somehow, Bossuet’s attempt, by translating in secular terms a theology of history and constructing a new sacred history, with the presupposition of being able to capture the totality of history; in reference to the secular translations of Joachimism, from Lessing onwards. Now, the orientation of today’s historical thought, which does not at all presume to assign a goal or an end to history, is very different.

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The philosophies of history established themselves on the foundation of a philosophy that was thought to be definitive, whereas today’s historicism is precisely the renunciation of this definitiveness. However, this objection does not seem relevant to me: also from the standpoint of historical truth one can say that certain positions have been left behind for good because they were tied to a historical situation that cannot return; and in historicism one cannot give any other criterion for the adequacy of a philosophy than its ability to place historically other worldviews, putting in their right place the truths they affirmed, a task that, supposedly, these other world views are incapable of performing. The fact that the general periodization schemes formed at the time of the philosophies of history does not at all negate the fact that they can also be thought, and actually are thought, by those most opposed to the philosophy of history. If anything, it raises the undoubtedly important question whether the historicist critiques of the philosophy of history did not form within a vision already determined by a philosophy of history: which, at least in Croce’s case, seems undeniable.26 Moving on to the second question, we must observe that, among all concepts of historical periodization, the equation of modernity and 26 We know the criticism that the “non-definitiveness of history,” as Croce understands it, ultimately dissimulates the affirmation of the definitiveness of a precise historical period (Europe from 1870 to 1915, the “age of distincts”). In other words, his critique of the philosophy of history dissimulates one particular philosophy of history. In Lukácsian terms we could say that his reform of Hegelianism consisted in going from direct apology for a historical order to indirect apology. But this is not what I want to linger on now. I think we should focus, instead, on his declaration in “Contributo a una critica di me stesso”: “I quickly settled down in a sort of unconscious immanentism, without feeling directly the question of transcendence in the first place, and thus finding no difficulty in conceiving the relationship between thought and being” (Etica e politica [Bari: Laterza, 1945], 397). As a psychological attitude, there is nothing to say. However, in his philosophical activity, this attitude was translated into acceptance of a vision of history, whereby the question of transcendence was by now definitively surpassed, and his whole philosophy formed within this vision, which not only was not problematized but also was affirmed to be non-problematizable. Croce was indeed the most intransigent adversary of the revision of what he called the functional concepts of historical periodization. Now I would like to suggest that, from Croce’s own point of view – which holds that thought is alive when it forms in reference to a specific historical situation – the novelty of the situation imposes such problematization. His philosophy was the only one that came together with Marxism as its first and essential adversary. It failed precisely because within its vision of history it is Marxism that is right.

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secularity is the one that has endured the most; and not because it is objectively the most resistant but simply because it has been the least problematized, as one can easily verify by considering how small is the critical literature concerning it.27 In this regard we just need to think what a different fate befell the concept that used to be its counterpart, that of the middle ages; or those that were viewed as the transition period between it and the modern age, humanism and the Renaissance; or the Protestant Reformation itself. The fundamental reason for this seems to be the following: the equation of modernity and secularity seems to be the only point of agreement between the two major visions of history of the first half of the nineteenth century, upon which the frameworks of later historiography depend: that of German Idealism (and of its Marxist inversion) and that of Catholic Romanticism (which in its inversion gave rise to the historical perspective of Comtian positivism). According to the vision of Catholic Romanticism, the modern age is a crisis against which we need to restore the European spiritual unity that was destroyed three centuries ago.28 Supposedly, this crisis began when nominalism prevailed in late Scholasticism; it prepared Luther’s psychologism, of which the doubt and the cogito of Descartes are the philosophical replica. It is very easy to spot the symmetry between this historical vision and that of Hegel and those who depend on it; according to this philosophy of history, too, the various spiritual products of the modern age form a consistent process, except that, of course, the process does not move towards fullness but towards catastrophe. Such vision also conditions the origin of the new Thomism, which must be found in the denunciation of the solidarity between this vision and the theoretical affirmation of Ontologism, based on the consideration that Ontologism, too, is modern. The appeal to Thomism has its first foundation in a consideration drawn from history: that it is the only

27 See F. Lombardi, Nascita del mondo moderno (Asti: Arethusa, 1953), 49: “It is symptomatic that despite all the past and present use of the word ‘modern’ people have not taken the trouble to make this concept undergo an exhaustive analysis.” 28 We find the first explicit formulation of this vision of history in de Bonald; and its most rigorous exposition, perhaps, in Gioberti’s Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (Venice: Fontana, 1854). I already mentioned in the Introduction the important role that reflection upon the French Revolution played in the formation of this and other historical visions of the 1800s.

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philosophy that was not extended into the modern age. Certainly, the subsequent development of neo-Thomism entails the abandonment of the “archeological utopia” and the fuller and fuller acquisition of historicity. However, given the premise, this is done through the idea of a unitary process of modern philosophy, which, having reached its endpoint, must turn into Thomistic realism by virtue of a dialectic dynamics whereby it cannot stop at either phenomenism or Idealism. Thus, apart from the final inversion, the secular visions of the history of modern philosophy are not, in their general features, contested by neo-Thomism.29

29 Regarding the decisive role of this historical perspective in the development of Catholic thought in the 1800s, from traditionalism to Ontologism and later neoThomism, see L. Foucher, La philosophie catholique en France au XIX siècle, avant la renaissance thomiste et dans son rapport avec elle (Paris: Vrin, 1955). As the idea of the “anti-modern” carried on to its most rigorous consequences, this perspective is very visible in the initiators of neo-Thomism – for example, in Balmès and in Fr Liberatore (in whose book La conoscenza intellettuale [Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1857] his tendentious, but intelligent, definition of the modernity of Ontologism is very important). But consider Maritain himself (and here I will say right away that we must recognize, against facile criticisms, his outstanding value as the rigorous philosophical systematizer of one of the greatest spiritual experiences straddling the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries  – that of Lèon Bloy). His agreement with the modern world maintains the opposition to Descartes and, essentially, the complete devaluation of modern philosophy; it is an agreement, in a certain sense, with the “anti-modern” ferments of the modern. As for his progressivism, it is to be explained by his fine sensitivity to current history, which led him to break away from the traditional anti-modern position of simultaneously condemning liberalism and socialism because of the proFascist attitudes to which this idea inevitably led (not by chance the most important recent disciple of Donoso Cortès has been Carl Schmitt). Regarding the type of thought that, instead, sees in modern philosophy a sort of circular process that brings it back to Thomism, one of its most rigorous and intelligent expressions has been the assessment of Actualism by G. Bontadini. In my judgment it is inadequate, at least in the form it took in the past, due to the thesis, which I certainly could not make my own, that Idealism is the essence of modern philosophy. The presence of the Bonaldian historical scheme in the work of Leo XIII, and especially in the encyclical Aeterni Patris, has been highlighted, I believe for the first time, in Brunschvicg’s Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale t. 2 (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 502 – somewhat tendentiously, for sure, but to a large extent correctly, as clarified in the book by Fr. Foucher.

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3. INEVITABILITY OF THE CARTESIAN BEGINNING Let us now move on to the third question. You may object that it is illposed, for the simple reason that every vision of the historical process is always relative to a philosophy. I will now completely set aside how archaic is this idea that one needs to have a philosophy as a condition to practise history of philosophy. Nor will I linger on the annihilating effect that such a position has on history (which is reduced to a search for genealogies, to a logical sequence of necessarily disincarnate ideas because they are cut off from the real questions that led to them and from the personality of the philosopher who thought them, and become “no longer relevant stages,” thus rejecting what is expressly of interest to the historian – knowledge of the other as other and so on) because these criticisms have been very well articulated already. What I am interested in is showing, instead, that the idea of the secularity of modern philosophy, in whatever manner it may be proposed (either Idealist, or Marxist, or positivist, or by the Enlightenment, or even neo-Thomist) contains a sequence of obligatory points. They are: (1) the Cartesian beginning of modern philosophy; (2) the radical opposition between Descartes and Pascal; (3) the failure of a new scholastics, founded on the agreement between Christian thought and Cartesianism, in Malebranche; (4) the lack of awareness, in Vico, of his real place in history, so that his philosophy exemplifies most perfectly his theory of the heterogenesis of ends. Here a remark is necessary. The first point is necessarily obligatory for every reconstruction of modern philosophy whereas the other three are proper to the secular perspective. And they are the essential and necessary points for this vision, so that we can say that the question of whether modern philosophy is secular or not can be answered by studying the philosophy of the 1600s. Because if, in fact, Descartes is opposed to Pascal and (regarding the essential elements of his thought) to Malebranche, then necessarily Descartes continues in the Enlightenment. Pascal becomes the isolated witness of a new civilization that can no longer be traced back to transcendent Christianity; Malebranche becomes the proof of a catastrophe, that of an attempt at modern scholastics, which later will also sweep away Gioberti and Rosmini; Vico, cut off from any continuity with antecedent Christian thought, can be continued only in a historicism of the Romantic or Enlightenment kind.

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Afterwards, there will only be room in Catholic thought for either academic or exigential philosophies, or for constructions that are actually practical acts, in defence of an institution. Let us consider the first point. It may seem that this idea of the Cartesian beginning merely exemplifies that love for plastic figures that is proper to the philosophy of history (dismissing authorities, the doubt; entrusting oneself only to reason, the cogito) and that there is nothing more anti-historical than identifying the new principle, of which subsequent philosophy is allegedly just the development, in the cogito, separated from the rest of Descartes’s work. Nor can one forget Bergson’s irony when he evokes the caricature of Cartesianism as “armoire aux possibles,” whence all forms of modern philosophy derive by simple logical development.30 It is undeniable that the Cartesian beginning was often understood in this way; but it is amenable to an altogether different meaning, which I think is ineliminable, and whose truth is not diminished in the least by having sometimes been combined with a caricature. In order to understand it, it is helpful to start from the feature that confers to Descartes’s philosophy an unparalleled singularity. First of all, it is the only one among the great philosophies that can only be thought of as a beginning and not also as an outcome: this leads it to set itself in opposition to past history and to present itself as new not just in intention, like Bacon’s philosophy, but in execution. Furthermore: referring to Descartes as beginner – and consequently distinguishing two aspects of his thought, of which only one is true – is necessarily part of the historical horizon inherent to every modern philosophy as awareness of its own situation. The examples are well known; I will just recall a few to show that every modern philosophy encountered Descartes precisely at the instant when it affirmed itself as modern, when it resisted the danger of letting itself be reabsorbed by the past, be it scholasticism, or “pagan ontology,” or naturalistic metaphysics in general. Indeed, consider the aspect whereby the originality of Descartes’s philosophy lies in its proposing itself as a philosophy of freedom that is not merely a philosophy about freedom; and consider the consequent foundation of personalism (as coincidence of the first truth with the affirmation of my own transcendence with respect to the world) and of

30 Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 127.

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theocentric humanism (I cannot affirm myself as a reality that transcends the world without affirming God): there is in nuce all French spiritualism until the “philosophie de l’esprit.” We also find in Cartesianism – in a form that is implicit, but implicit only to a point – another element of subsequent French thought: the idea of a Christian philosophy by essence – that is, a philosophy that rejects the Thomistic and humanistic continuity of Hellenic thought and Christian thought, while still affirming itself as a philosophy. But, on the other hand, all past forms of secular thought can take new life and become modern by grafting Cartesian thought onto themselves. Thus, libertinism will be able to refashion itself as the Enlightenment by combining with an aspect of Cartesianism, and Renaissance naturalism will become Spinozism by combining with Cartesianism; where in both cases the Cartesian moment serves as a mediator between trends that until then had been opposed to each other, in the first case libertinism and iusnaturalism, in the second Renaissance naturalism and the predestinationism of the Reformation. And it has been pointed out that even the French materialism of the eighteenth century, in its novel aspect, refers to Descartes. Thus, modern empiricism can be born in Locke by combining Cartesianism with the previous English tradition; and the stages of empiricist thought curiously repeat, in a transposition that radically changes their meaning, the stages of Cartesian thought (Malebranche-Berkeley; Pascal-Hume; Arnauld-Reid). Or, regarding the presence of Cartesianism in classical German Idealism, think of Kant’s recovery of the analysis of mathematical judgment against Humean skepsis, after Cartesianism’s defeat by the latter, or think of the curious analogy of adversaries (Descartes against Suarezian scholastics and libertine skepsis; Kant against Wolfean scholastics and Humean skepsis, or the abandonment in both of them of “general ontology”); or think of Kant’s recovery of the theme of the cogito that accompanies all our representations. German Idealism can be viewed as a radical development of the Cartesian idealistic theme, which ends up eliminating personalism. But even in Hegel, who surpasses Spinozism (in Schelling), and thereby surpasses the radical form of “pagan” ontology via the consideration of man viewed as negativity with respect to nature, we can see a recovery of the Cartesian theme of freedom explicating itself as negativity. Hegel’s quest for a “Christian philosophy” presupposes a historical horizon in which Descartes’s philosophy appears to be the “first attempt at a Christian philosophy”; so that Hegel’s philosophy can be presented as a recovery of Cartesian

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themes, after having already taken for granted Spinoza’s victory over Descartes; so that the affirmation of the humanistic theme must take the historicist form, excluding the personalist motif. No less influenced by the Cartesian way of posing the question of realism is the modern one, not only, for example, in Arnauld and Reid but also in certain forms of neo-Thomism, which are doomed to defeat precisely because they have accepted framing the question in terms such that the victory of Idealism is necessary: in brief, they have accepted the reduction of realism to thingish realism,31 with the consequent, correlative appearance of solipsistic themes and of the theory of common sense, in its modern meaning.32 To refer to more recent developments, consider the revival of the reduction of psychologism to skepticism in Husserlian neo-Cartesianism, or the presence, in the theme of the free creation of eternal truths, of the break between essence and existence,33 so that we can say that the Cartesian crisis of theology prefigures the terms in which the crisis of anthropology presents itself today. Moreover, every modern philosophy constitutes itself within the historical horizon determined by Cartesianism. Indeed, if we look at what is being excluded, Descartes marks the beginning of the outdatedness of Thomism – as the only philosophy destined not to be extended (whereas every other trend from the past, be it religious or secular, takes new life after Cartesianism) – which seems to define, by negation, modern philosophy; which is also, in a sense to be discussed, the outdatedness of Christian humanism. This is why the “anti-Descartes” theme is essential to the trends of thought that denounce the modern as a crisis. Nor is it an option to replace “the beginning of modern philosophy in the thought of Descartes” with the more generic “beginning of modern philosophy in the new science.” This thesis has often been advanced by reducing the distance between the position of Descartes and that of Bacon and Galileo; or, sometimes, by contrasting the modernity of Galileo’s scientific position with the, still scholastic, idea of science entertained by Descartes (unity of science and philosophy, like in Aristotelianism; consequent ontologization of physics, dogmatism, etc.) 31 [TN] Cosale in the original, a made-up word derived from cosa (thing). 32 On this, see Étienne Gilson, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1947). 33 To mention two opposite extremes of the philosophy of existence, see the importance that this theme has for Shestov and Sartre.

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and making Descartes the initiator, more than of modern philosophy, of the metaphysicalism that remains in it, or of the “subjectivist error” from which, supposedly, modern philosophy ought to free itself in order to realize itself as effective empiricism. This attempt would be valid if one could explain the philosophy of Descartes based on his science; but the quest to do so has failed since nobody has ever been able to establish a necessary link between his metaphysical construction and his scientific one.34 The physical-positivist interpretation finds itself forced to deny altogether the originality of his strictly philosophical thought, regarding it as the mere result of an erosion of the traditional theses in order to make them agree with the novelty of his science; a thesis that has been shown to be indefensible. In actuality, Descartes begins modern philosophy precisely in as much as his position is unique in the general area of the thinkers of the new science; in as much as his philosophy can be regarded as a “metaphysical accident” in the history of mechanistic physics.35 His uniqueness is this: he views his science as an element that can only find total justification in a system that surrogates the Aristotelian-Thomist construction, better realizing the unity of reason and faith and the continuity of metaphysics and physics that the latter had undertaken, with the ontologization of physics that I mentioned as the inevitable outcome. So that, paradoxically, we must say: being less modern than others in his scientific mindset, Descartes begins modern philosophy expressly in the attempt to achieve a synthesis whose flavour is still close to the Middle Ages, on which those other thinkers had given up. If some outcomes of modern philosophy look like radical extensions of Baconism and Galileism, it is nonetheless true that such extensions could only be reached by exploring more deeply questions that arose in Cartesian philosophy and not in those of Bacon and Galileo. Hence the importance of this question: Where can we detect the continuation of the critical and new aspect of Descartes’s thought (needless to say, “continuity” means something other than “necessary filiation”)? In Spinoza? In Bayle and the Enlightenment? In Locke? In Kant? In the radical development of subjectivist Idealism? In idealistic 34 For a strong affirmation of this impossibility, which in fact has already been asserted many times, see F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1950), 9–10. 35 [TN] Del Noce is quoting Robert Lenoble, Mersenne, 614.

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Ontologism? Or in Pascal? This latter is my thesis, which I will try to outline in its general features in the pages that follow. Regarding Goldmann, I already pointed out the necessity he faces – given his interpretation of Marxism, in order to keep it from being absorbed into different positions – to distinguish to the utmost dialectic rationalism from mere rationalism (in whatever form it expresses itself, metaphysical or critical) and, thus, to insert between the rationalist conception and the dialectic conception a third position, the “tragic vision,” which is logically superior to simple rationalism and susceptible to being surpassed only by dialectic rationalism; so that, curiously, the Pascal problem becomes fundamental to both the Catholic revision and the Marxist revision of the history of modern philosophy.

4. THE CONCEPT OF CATHOLIC REFORMATION Let us observe that the shift from the concept of Counter-Reformation as a defensive reaction to that of Catholic Reformation, which instead underscores initiative and innovation, clearly interferes with the interpretation of the philosophy of the 1600s. Indeed, the negative concept of Counter-Reformation cannot be left behind merely on the basis of the Counter-Reformation’s organizational and pedagogical features: its merits in determining dogmas, in education and in the moral discipline of the clergy, in the works of charity and welfare, in missionary activity, and so on. Nor, at least in the first place, can it be left behind by highlighting its saints and its heroes. All of this can be easily accepted by the supporters of the usual secular interpretation. Rather, it is a matter of showing that its primary intuition, whence all its manifestations set forth, albeit with contrasting theological interpretations – namely, the correlation between the Protestant negation of man, of his freedom and of his merits, and the degradation of God to mere irrational power36 – is a true idea and not the ideological cover

36 In fact, this theme unites the most antithetical Catholic theological trends of that age, Molinism and Jansenism. A certain reading of Pascal’s Provincial Letters, certainly not reflective of the intentions of the author, and an interpretation of the history of Port-Royal, as proof of the necessary break between authentic Christianity and the new Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, have been decisively important in the elaboration of the negative concept of Counter-Reformation. Conversely, an

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for a practical will and a compromise. It seems to me that, from the historical perspective, a precious element in solving this problem is answering the question whether such an idea was or was not generative of rational values; that is, applying the same method that Gilson has used for medieval thought. Now, four philosophers of the first rank, who are also counted as representatives of modern philosophy, belong because of their faith to the Catholic Reformation, determined chronologically as the period in which Catholicism had as its essential adversaries Protestantism and the offshoots of Renaissance naturalism, and not yet the Enlightenment. They are precisely Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico. We can wonder: What is the relationship between the questions that mark the Catholic Reformation and what is new and original in their thought? The standard judgment on this matter is known, but is it well founded?

5. GOLDMANN ON DESCARTES AND PASCAL Let us now go back to Goldmann’s thesis. It contains three paradoxes that, at the very least, cannot be proven on the basis of the texts: that the Pensées are not an apology of the Christian religion but a “solitary dialogue”; that it is not only difficult de facto but also impossible de jure to look for an order by right of the Pensées because the natural expression of Pascal’s thought was, by virtue of the tragic vision, in paradoxes and fragments for which the search for an order by right is essential but defeat in this attempt is no less essential; finally, the reduction of belief to parier. Although unprovable by themselves, these paradoxes follow from the idea that only the “significant structure” of the tragic vision can account for Pascal’s thought; then, under this hypothesis, they exceptionally important document – because it is the only case in which a Protestant philosopher encountered the central theme of the Catholic Reformation – must be recognized in Leibniz’s experience in his encounter with the thought of the Jesuit theologians during his polemics against Spinoza. Regarding the possible directions of this research, which to a large extent has already been conducted by various scholars, but about which there is still something to add, see page 58n35 in my work “La crisi del Molinismo in Descartes,” in Metafisica ed esperienza religiosa, Quaderni dell’Archivio di Filosofia 35 (1956): 39–77. But we know the current historical assessment has distinguished two Leibnizes – one bent on the desperate enterprise of restoring Europe’s religious and political unity, the other turned towards the future – which explains why scholars have rarely paid attention to this encounter.

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acquire enough power of verisimilitude.37 Hence, the discussion must concern the legitimacy of applying this structure to Pascal’s thought. First of all, it is very peculiar that in the whole book there is not even one reference to Nietzsche – that is, to he who is commonly regarded, and felt himself to be, the tragic thinker par excellence. This omission is not accidental because the concept of tragic vision, in the form described by Goldmann, cannot be applied to him. Apparently one must conclude that the Pascal-Nietzsche question is a problem that should not be posed. But does that not set aside a whole cluster of extremely relevant problems? Namely, whether the fullness of the tragic moment is found in the history of atheism and not in that of religious thought; whether ignoring this problem is a sign that for Marxist thought it is impossible to really place, and thus to surpass,38 Nietzsche by integrating him into the history of philosophy, and this to the extent that the Nietzschean stage of atheism expresses the criticism of the transition from negative atheism to positive atheism that Marx had attempted. Shall we say that there is a tragic moment in the history of religious thought, represented by Pascal, and a tragic moment in the history of atheistic thought, represented by Nietzsche? But in that way we would depart from the exact sense of the idea of tragic vision proposed by Goldmann, in which the “hidden God,” present and absent, is a necessary element. Because this is the thing: if we stopped at saying that Pascal, because of his anti-humanism, carried to the limit the tragic aspects of Christian thought (he focused the attention on sin and Redemption rather than on Creation and Incarnation), we would say something very true (although obvious) but altogether different from what Goldmann affirms –that we must understand Pascal’s Christianity starting from the tragic vision and not the other way around.

37 Regarding the reduction of believing to parier, Goldmann himself has granted that it is a plausible hypothesis but not absolutely indisputable (see Recherches dialectiques, 344n1). See also, in Cahiers de Royaumont, the discussion, revolving mostly around this issue, which followed his presentation. 38 A document of this could be the chapter devoted by Lukàcs, in his well-known work titled The Destruction of Reason (London: The Merlin Press, 1980), to Nietzsche “the founder of irrationalism.” But here the discussion would have to be very long because it should address the reasons why it is impossible for Marxism to apply to Nietzsche the criterion of surpassing-and-integrating, thus isolating an aspect of truth in his thought.

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I will try to develop my critique of this interpretation from a particular angle, which I think succeeds in capturing it and hitting it in the essential. Its core points are preserving the traditional thesis that there is a pure opposition between Descartes and Pascal – an opposition that is actually stretched to the maximum, so that Descartes represents the full expression of the “rationalist vision” and Pascal that of the “tragic vision” – and affirming that it is impossible to go back, after Pascal, to the Augustinian doctrine of the presence of God – a thesis that is a bit out of sight but still present. If these points were invalidated, this whole vision of modern philosophy – with its three essential forms – rationalism, tragic vision, and dialectic thought (and the overcoming of the tragic vision in the latter) – would be irremediably undermined. The terms in which Pascal formulated his opposition to Descartes are very well known: “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.”39 According to the standard interpretation this passage means: Pascal recognized, alone among his contemporaries, that the Cartesian proof of the existence of God is actually an atheistic proof; his God is actually a God of the philosophers, the foundation for a physics meant to ensure man’s domination of the world; his proof is a proof that comes after a doubt so radical that it extends to the supernatural in the Bible itself, so that it is able to completely separate the philosophical God from the religious God. Pascal grasped the novelty of Descartes behind the traditional formulas, and in the novelty of Descartes he grasped the “secular” novelty of the modern (i.e., a form of atheism that comes “after” Christianity). In fact, this idea of the radical opposition between Descartes and Pascal is an obligatory step in the secular interpretation of modern philosophy, which must identify a secular principle as the critical and new element of Cartesian thought for the reasons I have already given. Indeed, let us consider the common interpretation of Pascal in secular historiography: he is first of all the ante litteram critic of all subsequent trascendentalist interpretations, ranging from neo-scholasticism to pragmatism and religious existentialism; he is the one who denounced the non-religious nature of all attempts at a Catholic restoration that have

39 Pascal, Pensées, frag. 77.

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come forth after the advent of the new science, striking down those that had already developed and anticipating later ones. He is such because he wrecked the scholastic ideal of Christian philosophy – as a work of adaptation to join a theology given by Revelation with a philosophy also given after Aristotle and Plotinus – by criticizing every natural theology presented as a rational introduction to the revealed truths, and all related attitudes of thought. His renewal of Augustine’s polemic against Pelagius ended up involving all the aspects of Augustinianism that had continued into Medieval philosophy or that had manifested themselves in the innatistic or ontologistic aspects of Descartes’s thought. The reaction that in the Provinciales had targeted the Jesuitic compromise between Christianity and the changed spirit of the times, in which the sense of man’s sinfulness had waned, in the Pensées ends up attacking Cartesianism, humanism, and scholasticism40 – in short, the idea of “Christian philosophy” in all its forms. The criticism of the “modern world” applies to everything in tradition that prepared it. After such a collapse of the metaphysical proofs, the only avenue that remains open to him is the historical one since, on the other hand, because of Port-Royalist theology, Pascal ignores the Romantic routes of subjectivistic fideism and religious pragmatism (which are tied from Rousseau until James to an “apotheosis of the I,” which is the exact opposite of his thought). Indeed, he endeavours “to bring to the proof of our supernatural past the same scruple for complete exactness, the same care to gather the opposing reasons, to foresee them, to overcome them, that he had already put to work in order to bring into focus and highlight the causality of nature.”41 But here his investigation enters into a loop because the divine inspiration of scripture, which should be the object of his proof, is instead its presupposition. So Pascal’s true contribution supposedly lies in the critique of traditional metaphysical and theological thought, not in his historical apologetics, and the true founder of biblical exegesis was not he but Spinoza. In short, there is a peculiar heterogenesis of ends: the Pensées were written in view of an apologetics of Christian religion against the

40 If one tries and compares the pages that Brunschvicg devotes to Pascal in Le progrès de la conscience, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 156–60, with those on St Thomas (108–11) one gets the impression that he sees in Pascal the exact anti-thesis of St Thomas and that his great love for the former is exactly proportional to his aversion to the latter. 41 Leon Brunschvicg, Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1953), 77–8.

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libertines; in fact, they are still of interest in as much as they oppose the traditional conceptions of religious philosophy and they criticize in advance the subsequent ones. Their purpose was to focus the attention on sacred history as the place where certain proofs of the supernatural are found. In effect, through his critique of “Christian philosophy,” he outlined in implicit form the historical vision that subsequent secular thought has made clear. Clearly we have here an absorption of the substance of the Pensées into the destructive work of the Provinciales. And it is on this precise point, how to account for the specific character of the Pensées, that Goldmann intends to go beyond Brunschvicg’s interpretation, which he presents as the highest degree that rationalism can reach in understanding Pascal. While keeping the general premise of secular interpretations – which can be defined as follows: “only those who are not in the least tempted by transcendent Christianity can truly understand Pascal; because Pascal is essentially the destroyer of every precedent and subsequent line of ‘Christian philosophy,’ and this destructive position is his solitude” – Goldmann thinks that only dialectic thought in its Marxist form can account for the Pensées, appropriating Pascal’s criticism of rationalism itself. Curiously, if you think that Brunschvicg understood God to be the infinite, spontaneous progress of conscience through history, we could categorize his interpretation and Goldmann’s as the consistent deistic and atheistic answers, respectively, to Pascal’s argument. Regarding the second point, we can refer to a very insightful remark by Baudin, which Brunschvicg picked up and extended in what was his spiritual testament, L’Esprit européen: “Along the whole course of Augustinian speculation, we can discern the constant presence and parallel development of two philosophical Augustinianisms, that of the Ontologism of rational truths, which comes to unfold in Descartes, and that of the experimentation of religious truths which reaches its climax in Pascal. They are two different Augustinianisms which generate two different intuitionisms, that of pure reason and that of the heart.”42 Not only are they different, Brunschvicg adds, but such that in history they eventually turned out to be incompatible and antagonistic to each other, and the moment of the break between them was precisely the

42 Leon Brunschvicg, L’Esprit européen (Neuchâtel, Éditions de la Baconnière, 1947), 76–7.

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first century of modern philosophy, the 1600s. This break expressed itself in those two Augustinian Summae: Jansen’s Augustinus and Ambrosius Victor’s Philosophia christiana, which so displeased the Jansenists and was so useful,43 instead, to Malebranche. And then above all in the opposition between Pascal and Malebranche: Think of Pascal’s dialogue Mystère de Jésus. We cannot conceive of a more violent contrast than the third of the Méditations chrétiennes in which Malebranche in his turn makes Jesus speak: “Know that all the spirits are united to me, that the philosophers, the wicked, the demons themselves, cannot be entirely separated from me; because if they see some necessary truth, it is in me that they discover it, because outside of me there is no eternal, immutable, necessary truth” … Whereas according to Pascal the essential core of religion is the transcendence of the order of faith and charity, which is a supernatural order, not comparable with the order of spirit and truth, Malebranche’s Christianity aims at restoring the only order, which is the very order of reason. Malebranche utters the words that seem best suited to upset the doctors of Port-Royal, taking care, however, to give himself cover with the authority of St Augustine: “Faith will pass, but intelligence will subsist eternally.”44

Hence we understand why Goldmann’s opposition is above all to Laporte and his school (Russier, Lewis, Mesnard), who, on the contrary, incline to affirm the closest proximity of Descartes and Pascal. Given the importance of this opposition, it is helpful to quote one of the passages in which Laporte insists most strongly on the closeness between Descartes and Pascal: We ask what is the value of Reason. The idea of the Infinite gives us the answer. This idea is the keystone of our rational knowledge. Among our clear and distinct ideas, it is the one on which all others must rely to give rise to “true and certain science” and give us possession of immutable truths. But at the same time it shows us that these truths, like everything that shares in being, are the work of a reason that dominates them and is not subject to their

43 Arnauld reproached Ambrosius Victor (the oratorian Fr André Martin) “de ne ramasser que le fatras de saint Augustin, et de laisser les plus beaux morceau” (Brunschvicg, L’Esprit, 79) [TN: “for taking only St Augustine’s mishmash and leaving the most beautiful parts”]. 44 Brunschvicg, L’Esprit, 79–81.

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laws; that consequently our reason draws its light from a principle in which knowing and acting coincide, and which is still Reason, if you wish, but a Reason that is heterogeneous and irreducible to ours. So, it is our Reason that, by reflecting about itself, knows its own limitations. And Descartes could make Pascal’s sentence his own: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things that surpass it.” In the “first and most important of its ideas” reason has the non-problematic but positive perception of a field of reality about which it proves both that it exists and that it escapes us – that is, the living God. Now, by a peculiar encounter, this reality beyond our Reason constitutes the entire object of Religion.45

Let us now listen to Goldmann’s answer: A historian who is an authority in the interpretation of seventeenth century thought, the late Jean Laporte, has maintained  – and this was one of his fondest ideas – the philosophical equivalence of the positions of Descartes and Pascal. However, it seems to me that this thesis must be met with the most serious reservations, and I will give only one but eloquent example. Laporte quotes fragment 267, “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things that surpass it,” and adds the following comment: “understand that what surpasses reason, and what reason finds in everything, is infinity. Let us observe that on this matter Pascal’s position is analogous to that of Descartes. Also Descartes teaches …” In Pascal’s text “surpass” is in the plural, but now Laporte replaces the plural with the singular. According to Pascal “an infinity of things” – even better, every individual thing  – surpass the possibilities of reason. According to Descartes, reason is surpassed only by the infinite. By replacing the plural with the singular Laporte has evidently replaced one position with another; you will be convinced of that by reading what follows in fragment 267, which in fact Laporte does not quote: “it (reason) is just weak if it does not get to know this … If natural things surpass it, what shall we say about supernatural ones?” Thus, according to Pascal, natural and supernatural things surpass reason. Contrary to Laporte’s interpretation, this is exactly the opposite of Cartesian epistemology.46

45 Jean Laporte, Le rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1945), 297. 46 Goldmann, Blaise Pascal, 114–15.

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In other words, Laporte’s interpretation is made possible by arbitrarily isolating within a work certain partial elements and by the consequent facile comparison that can be made with apparently analogous elements from another work, also in isolation. According to Goldmann, it is precisely the introduction of the concept of significant structure that has the power to prevent this procedure.

6. THE “SIGNIFICANT STRUCTURE” OF CARTESIANISM I will formulate my disagreement with Goldmann by stating a group of theses, which in my view make it possible to recover and extend Laporte’s overall interpretation of the thought of the 1600s, perfecting it as a consequence of having accepted using the methodological tool “significant structure.”47

47 In the failure to use, even implicitly, this methodological concept, we can see the limitations of the work of a great historian like Laporte, whose truly outstanding merit is the definitive demolition of the Leibnizian interpretation of Cartesianism – an interpretation that, in the manifold ways in which it can be developed, had dominated, we can say, philosophical historiography up to him. In regard to this limitation, consider, for example, his book Rationalisme de Descartes: undoubtedly he demolished for good the traditional idea of Descartes’s rationalism by showing that, in all his theses (except for the ontological proof), there is a reference to the theory of divine infinity and freedom that expressly implies a critique of rationalism. While he decisively clarified that the philosophy of Descartes cannot be extended into the dogmatic rationalism of Spinoza or Leibniz, or into the rationalism of the constitutive activity of the spirit, or even into the rationalism of the Enlightenment, his work is less persuasive when it moves to the positive part. The very method he followed, of an integral reconciliation of all Cartesian texts, yielded an overall presentation of the thought of Descartes that is rather different from the one he himself gave in his works. In fact, one is left perplexed by the fact that the form in which Laporte presents Cartesian thought does not match any of those the philosopher chose: not that of the Discourse, not that of the Meditations, not that of the Principles. But then, does not the hiatus between the spirit and the letter that Laporte meant to close open up again? We have a Descartes who lacks, in some way, the Cartesian accent; his doctrine is at risk of being detached once again from his personality and from the historical reality in which he thought. Based on the “reconciliation of texts” some juxtapositions that are problematic become easy. For example, that with Pascal is perfectly correct, but Laporte pushes it so far that the aspect of opposition, which is also real, disappears, and the difference reduces to one of “intellectual temperament” (Le rationalisme, 473). The consequences are more serious when, due to the reduction of the fundamental philosophical

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1. The conflict between Pascal and Descartes takes place within the same significant structure (for which neither “rationalism” nor “­tragic vision” are suitable descriptors), so that Pascal’s thought can be presented as the position into which the philosophy of Descartes is forced to turn when it wants to make space for the question, which is necessary within its horizon, of the transition from the truths of ­reason to the truths of faith (to the act of adhering to the truths of faith as truths and not as a traditional datum beyond discussion; in short, the question of religious conversion). 2. Within Cartesianism one can trace a conflict between humanism and anti-humanism so that, on the one hand, its humanistic continuation was possible only by eliminating the metaphysics of Descartes (­consider the empiricist and the materialist developments of Descartes) while, on the other hand, religious Cartesianism ­necessarily had to take an anti-humanist accent. 3. Pascal’s thought can be regarded as the complete explication of a critique of metaphysics that was implicit as a possibility in the thought of Descartes and that is substantially different from the Kantian critique because it gives way not to rational faith but to faith in the supernatural. 4. There is objectively (i.e., independently of the awareness that ­individual thinkers may have had of it) a symmetry between the ­relationship of Kant’s critique with dialectic thought and the relationship of Pascal’s critique with the line of thought that, having started with Malebranche, continues, dissociated from Cartesianism, in Italian philosophy from Vico to Rosmini.

To me, these theses are so connected that one could only respond to Goldmann’s approach by writing a book titled Philosophy and Religion from Descartes to Vico. In an essay I am necessarily forced to give only a condensation, which cannot claim to be fully justified. Therefore, I have to limit myself to presenting it as a possible interpretation, trying however to provide in synthetic form all the elements for its justification.

oppositions to rationalism versus empiricism, from the designation “radical empiricism” (explicit for the philosophy of Descartes, implicit for that of Pascal; it contains some truth, but the word “empiricism” leads to many misunderstandings) Laporte arrives at a link between Descartes, Pascal, and Hume that is clearly anti-historical.

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In order to draw the conceptual scheme that makes it possible to give meaning to the term “Cartesianism” and to speak of Cartesian thinkers, I think one has to think, on the one hand, of the theory of freedom – considered not as one thesis among others of the system but as the original experience in reference to which all other theses are understandable – and, on the other hand, of the peculiar way in which this theme goes together with the greatest extension ever of the feature that has traditionally been called anti-historicism but that can be better described – using a term that Goldmann uses, referring it to the tragic vision – as ahistoricity.48 Such a feature is proper to Cartesian philosophy in the form whereby it distinguishes itself radically from both Platonism and Aristotelianism. Indeed, the various forms of historicism did not come out of the classical antithesis between Platonism and Aristotelianism. In fact, every form of historicism invokes either the Platonic or the Aristotelian tradition; for example, the atheistic historicism of the ­libertines invoked the Aristotelian one, and the religious historicism of Vico the Platonic one. Conversely, every historicist stance rejects the Cartesian spirit; thus, the appearance of historicist elements in the Enlightenment coincides punctually with the decomposition of Cartesianism. In this loss of history we must recognize both the locus of the break with the previous Christian tradition and a concession (in opposition) to libertinism; specifically, to the aspect of libertinism that made it the endpoint of Renaissance and Machiavellian historicism. This concession is expressed by granting that a philosophy that starts from a consideration of profane history must conclude in skepticism; all said and done, Cartesianism begins having already taken for granted the victory of libertine humanism over Christian humanism, thereby breaking with all that had flowed into humanism from the Christian tradition. This is why none of the major Cartesians invokes Plato, after the scientific and religious rejection of Aristotelianism – not even Malebranche, whose philosophy can be considered, from a certain angle, as the endpoint of ascetic Platonism combined with the complete sacrifice of political Platonism. It is also why, in Vico, the invocation of Plato coincides with the critique of Cartesianism.

48 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 43 [Hidden God], 34. [Goldmann’s English translator describes the tragic vision as “unhistorical.” This would suggest the term “unhistoricity,” which, however, appears not to be a proper English word].

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As for the affirmation that the theory of freedom is the “soul of Cartesianism,” I do not think it needs many justifications at the present state of scholarly criticism. We should just recall that the line of development followed by the interpretation of Descartes over the last hundred years has been marked by a regression from the Spinozian interpretation (centred on the divine substance), which is an obligatory thesis in German historiography from Leibniz to Hegel, to the Kantian (cogito), to the interpretation founded on the experience of freedom (and thus on doubt, but no longer understood in the rationalistic-Enlightenment sense of a decision to bring everything in front of the tribunal of reason). We should also observe that Descartes has been viewed as a philosopher of freedom since 1930, when for the first time he became relevant in conjunction with Spinoza and gnoseologism not being relevant; so that a possible question is whether Descartes’s being relevant coincides with his being studied without juxtapositions.49 Because in fact the simultaneous irrelevance of Spinoza and gnoseologism has made it possible to view Descartes as relevant because of the letter of what he says and not because of what it supposedly tends to – that is, it has made it possible to reduce to an object of historiography the symbolic transfiguration of Descartes proper to the philosophy of history of the nineteenth century, which I already mentioned. It has also made it possible to fill the hiatus, which was a correlate of that symbolic transfiguration. between his doctrine and his human person, since we can recognize in the theory of freedom the manifestation of the experience that simultaneously explains his life and his thought. Thus, the superiority of the interpretation in terms of philosophy of freedom lies in making possible a consistent interpretation of Cartesian thought and of the relationship between this thought and the person of the philosopher.50 49 Notice that an interpretation of Descartes centred on the theory of freedom is not in itself necessarily a religious interpretation, even though all interpreters who go in a religious direction must give this theme special relevance. Just think of the important book by F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris: Boivin, 1956) – abridged in Descartes, l’homme et l’ouvre (Paris: Boivin, 1956) – which develops an interpretation centred on freedom and yet definitely secular; or even of Sartre’s essay “La liberté cartesienne,” in Situations, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), which however has no historical value. 50 On this last point, I take the liberty to recall an old essay of mine titled “La personalità di Descartes,” written as the preface to an edition of the Meditations (Padova: Cedam, 1940).

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Let us just observe that there is a relationship between the theory of freedom and the method, and that it persists in the three great figures of religious Cartesianism: Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche. As Laporte says perfectly,51 for Descartes the method is a set of habits of attention, and for him attention means will or, which is the same, freedom. This doctrine of method as a tool to direct attention towards a truth that is not of our making but already given by God is accepted by all the thinkers of religious Cartesianism, as the doctrine that unites critical spirit and effort towards purification. It is accepted by the PortRoyalists and by Pascal: “It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe” (fragment 260).52 It is accepted by Malebranche, who will call such attention “natural prayer” because as an attitude turned towards God it implies “le corps endormi,” and through the silence of the body (and what else is the whole of his psychology, with its characteristic psycho-physiological aspect, if not a description of the difficulties one faces to achieve this silence?) it implies that the union with the world has been broken. So that, with a very felicitous phrase, people have described his philosophy as a metaphysical conception of the human person, defined as a reasonable being, amenable to participating in the universality of divine reason just by virtue of paying attention.53 Unlike regarding the themes of freedom and attention, regarding the theme of ahistoricity the connection among the three thinkers has never been studied, as far as I know. Its meaning was perceived, in my opinion, only by Vico when he attributed a “monastic” character to Cartesian philosophy, by which he meant expressly to refer to a sort of “encompassing context,” of “significant structure,” of totality that makes the real operations of Cartesian thought intelligible. In order to define it, many years ago, I thought that one should attribute great importance to Descartes’s political fragments, precisely in the sense that they allow us to define the non-problematized encompassing context within which his philosophy takes shape. I wrote at that time:

51 Laporte, Le rationalisme, 34–7. 52 On this point, see the very important discussion in Jeanne Russier’s La foi selon Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). 53 A. Robinet, “L’attitude politique de Malebranche,” in XVIIe Siècle (1958): 22.

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Would it not be appropriate to link the Cartesian critique of political rationalism, which is a consequence of the dissociation of what is rational and what is historical, with the critique of the revolutionary position that was developed by Pascal in very well-known passages, and by Malebranche in other passages which are almost unknown? Without repeating for the thousandth time, about the closeness of the political theses of Descartes and Pascal, that they are stated by the two thinkers ‘in a completely different spirit.’ Undoubtedly, in Pascal and in Malebranche the anti-revolutionary critique takes a different tone, more than a different meaning, being framed in a different theological context. And here the investigation should address the Molinist background … of Descartes’ religious position, which leads him not to mention, in a field that concerns pure nature, the topic of sin. A careful examination would make us recognize an initial identity of the three thinkers’ attitude towards politics, which does not depend on their religious position, even if afterwards it gets combined with it, taking in each one of them a different emphasis. The examination would show, in other words, that this attitude is essential to Cartesianism, raising the following question: whether this is not precisely the only element that remains identical in the philosophers who can be called ‘Cartesian,’ and whether the essence of Cartesianism can be defined in any other way than in terms of a particular relationship between interiority and exteriority.54

Thinking of his political fragments, Sainte-Beuve happened to write that, if Pascal had not been Christian, he would have been Machiavelli. Let us observe how profound this sentence is – he would not have been Plato, like St Augustine, or Aristotle, like St Thomas – and let us try to grasp it in all its depth. The coincidence between his political ideas and those of the heirs of Machiavelli, the libertine erudites, is really striking; except that, of course, these ideas are rethought by Pascal within the form of thought of Augustinian pessimism carried to the extreme.55 Nothing is left of the ancient Christian natural law. The principle of

54 A. Del Noce, “Cartesio e la politica,” Rivista di filosofia 41, no. 1 (1950): 3–30, pp. 20–1. 55 These connections between Pascal’s thought and libertine thought have been greatly emphasized by E. Baudin in La philosophie de Pascal II, Pascal, les libertines et les jansenistes (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946). Regarding the items discussed here, see especially chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 12. His remarks are often acute but suffer from the strange general outlook of his work – namely, that there is an authentic

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legitimacy lies in might: “Veri juris. – We have it no more; if we had it, we should take conformity to the customs of a country as the rule of justice. It is here that, not finding justice, we have found force, etc.” (fragment 297); “Justice, might.—It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just. Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognized and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just” (fragment 298); “Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established” (fragment 312). Thus, to use a short formula, it is a form of conservatism, which however is not founded on the rationality of the present order but on the idea that every order, since it is historical, is neither rational nor sacred. Which means, in particular and in reference to the situation of his epoch, consenting to absolutism, as an order that is purely exterior to spiritual life. Every social order is folly, but “true Christians nevertheless comply with folly, not because they respect folly, but the command of God, who for the punishment of men has made them subject to these follies” (fragment 338). In this position “peace” is the “sovereign good” (fragment 299), and “civil wars are the greatest of evils” (fragment 313); founded on the illusion of establishing justice, they can only lead to anarchy and, finally, to another equally arbitrary order. Therefore, we must have a “back thought” with which to judge everything, and yet talk like the common people (fragment 336) – that is, refrain from pointing out that the authority has no truth. The match with libertine thought is clear because what characterized it was the coincidence of two stances: identifying the critical spirit with the quest for radical desecration (the will to escape “naïveté”) and denying most radically the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, libertine thought of Pascal that has been warped by the influences of the libertines and the Jansenists. However, the best study of Pascal’s political idea is that by E. Auerbach, “La teoria politica di Pascal,” in Studi francesi (1957): 26–42.

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desecration concluded, in politics, with the apology of absolutism carried to its most extreme consequences by erasing all boundaries set by natural or divine law. Except that, whereas libertine thought led to the apology of the Prince in the Machiavellian sense, as the ideal type, Pascal intends to affirm the indifference of politics to the spiritual life. Certainly, politics has its own logic, which must be accepted. But the true good does not lie there: it is a reality from which one must interiorly free oneself, limiting acceptance to an exterior assent, while seeking to reach the supernatural domain of charity. If we now move on to Descartes’s position, we realize that it is essentially identical to that of Pascal, except of course for the reference to Augustinian pessimism. I will just summarize the conclusions I reached in the work I already cited. According to Descartes, too, every political order is historical and draws its reason to be from history alone and not from religious or rational necessity. But in his philosophy there is no room for history; a philosophy without history is matched by a history without philosophy. It would seem that this non-rational historicity of political orders should imply admitting their plurality without being able to make any theoretical pronouncement about the greater value of any one of them. However, Cartesianism, too, cannot escape what seems to be the structural necessity of every form of conservatism: theoretically it presents itself as compatible with a plurality of possible orders, but, in the meantime, because of the specific form in which it justifies itself, it always manifests itself as sanctioning one particular order. Considering the form in which Descartes upholds the distinction between what is rational and what is historical determines a form of conservatism that includes a necessary reference to the absolutist order; and this explains why, in the passages in which he deals with politics, Descartes always has in mind this order, and even the simple thought of the possibility of a different order seems to be foreign to him. Man finds himself living in a society in the same way as the soul finds itself living in a body; in both cases, this undoubtedly defines their type of existence in the world, but as a mere factual situation. In my formation as a spiritual subject I do not come across participation in social life as a necessary moment. On the other hand, this does not spare me the recognition that social life is factually necessary for the external conditions of my existence: the devaluation of social life is exactly as foreign to Cartesian thought as is the devaluation of the body. But in this way the established order becomes detached from the individuals as subjects

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of the spiritual life and stands in front of them as something totally exterior. Therefore, the political order transcends the private ones. Clearly, the essential exigency that politics thus understood must address can only be that of order; with the consequent characteristics of stability and unity, whence one moves – through steps that Descartes only implies but that are all too well known and easy – to the figure of the Prince and his absolute authority; exactly as for Pascal, every attempt at changing the present order in the name of reason can only lead, albeit at the very steep price of civil wars, to another order, which will also be historical (i.e., non-rational by definition); and actually to a tyrannical order because it will lack the aspect of legitimacy, and an illegitimate ruler is forced to preserve his power through crimes.56 However, Descartes supports absolutism for reasons that are not absolutistic but conservative, with very important consequences, because an essential element of conservatism is the distinction between politics and spiritual life. That is to say, if on the one hand Descartes necessarily inclines, because of his particular way of envisioning the relationship between the rational and the historical, to envision the political order as an absolutist order, on the other hand he desecrates it by depriving it of the possibility of a rational or religious foundation; by depriving it, in short, of the justifications whereby its subjects could feel part of a moral organism. But then, dissociated from spiritual life, the transcendence of the absolutist order seemingly tends to turn into a ­transcendence of pure exteriority, of the infrarational, so to speak; and the reverence towards it into purely external reverence without interior adherence, exactly as in Pascal.

56 See the letters to Princess Elizabeth of September and November 1646 (in Descartes, Lettre sur la Morale, ed. J. Chevalier [Paris: Boivin, 1935], 144–51, 160–1). The following sentence is intriguing: “In order to instruct a good Prince … it seems to me that we should propose to him completely opposite maxims [that is, opposite to those suggested by Machiavelli], and suppose that the means by which he established himself in power were just; as, in fact, I believe almost all of them are, when the Princes who use them deem them to be such; because among sovereigns justice has different boundaries than among private individuals, and it seems that on this occasion God gives right to those to whom He gives might” (145–6, emphasis mine). Where that supposition that eliminates the search for the origins of legitimacy  – because being “convinced” of it is necessary to the Prince in order to avoid his changing into a tyrant – has an obvious family resemblance with Pascal’s “secret thought.”

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Let us also observe: Descartes’s political thesis cannot be deduced from his metaphysics, and, conversely, history shows us that those who wished to extend rationalism to politics by appealing to the Cartesian spirit (like much of the Enlightenment) had also to eliminate Descartes’s metaphysics.57 Does this not indicate that the separation of the rational and the historical is the initial, non-problematized datum of Cartesianism, which in a certain sense is not and cannot be rationally founded, the initial datum that we must take into account in order to understand all the operations of his thought? The position of Malebranche is essentially identical, with an accent that brings it close to Pascal. Let us just quote a few passages: It is a certain truth that the differences in conditions are a necessary consequence of original sin, and that often quality, riches, high standing all take their origin from some injustice, and from the ambition of those to whom our forefathers owed their birth … And injustice, which may have been its source, now no longer felt, is not in our thoughts at all … But a Christian philosopher looks at this magnificence without being stimulated by what astonishes and prostrates weak imaginations … Human nature being the same in all men, and made for Reason, only merit ought to distinguish us, and only Reason guide us. But, sin having left concupiscence in those who commit it as well as in their descendants, men, though naturally equal, have ceased to form a society of equality under that same law, Reason. Force, or the law of the brutes … has become the mistress of men … Hence it is sin which introduced the difference in qualities or conditions into the world. For sin or concupiscence being given, it is a necessity that there be

57 In this regard the study of Locke is extremely interesting. C.A. Viano’s book, John Locke: Dal razionalismo all’illuminismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), which deserves great credit for having studied the formation of his philosophy in connection with the concrete problems that prompted the reflection from which it arose, ends as follows: “Locke thus turned Cartesian philosophy into a very convenient and handy tool, suitable to discuss and clarify questions that would have remained meaningless ­ within in the framework of Cartesian metaphysics. In this way … the world of political discussions entered official European culture” (560). As you can see, the agreement between my perspective and Viano’s could not be, on this point, more complete, even though, of course, I do not share his idea that Lockean philosophy must be viewed as the inheritor of the critical contributions of Cartesianism.

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differences. Even Reason requires this, because force is a law which must marshal those who no longer follow Reason.58

After having observed these common themes in Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche, we have the right to draw a few conclusions: (1) First of all, Cartesianism must be viewed and placed historically as the most complete inversion of libertine thought. This thesis ceases to sound strange as soon as we stop viewing libertinism, considered in its higher form (“le libertinage érudit”), as an essentially practical episode, relevant to the history of social customs rather than spiritual life and thought, and devoid of ideal content, besides the repetition of the old materialistic theses of heterodox Aristotelianism used to justify a form of scruples-free hedonism, and so on; when we recognize it, instead, in its relation with history, as the expression of a real doubt produced by the situation of the early decades of the 1600s – politics marked by the triumph of the Ragion di Stato – which the older culture could not understand; and, in regard to the cultural form in which it realizes itself, we see it as the first moment in which irreligion finds its strength in the consideration of the human world, invading the domain of wisdom in which humanism had defended itself from Averroist science; therefore,

58 Traité de Morale, pt. 2, ch. 11 [Treatise on Ethics, trans. C. Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 201–2]. Auerbach (“La teoria politica di Pascal,” 42) noticed the presence in Pascal’s political theory of revolutionary germs as well; and Robinet (“L’attitude politique de Malebranche”) said the same, at greater length, about the texts I quoted by Malebranche. When Rousseau (on whom Malebranche’s influence was very important) will read them in a different spirit … This aspect is indeed present in the fact that absolute power, while accepted, loses its sacred character. See, for example, Pascal’s Trois discours sur la condition des grands: “You must have … a doublesided thought; and if with men you act outwardly according to your rank, you must recognize, according to a more hidden but truer thought, that you have nothing above them by nature … The populace who admires you … believes that nobility is true greatness and regards the mighty as being of a different nature than others. Do not reveal this error to them, if you wish; but do not abuse this higher station with insolence, and above all do not misjudge yourselves by believing that your being has something in it more elevated than others” (ed. de la Pléiade, 617). In fact, “esprit cartesien” has often been understood, from Taine to Maxime Leroy (with different assessments), as synonymous with revolutionary spirit. Indeed, if one abandoned the metaphysical and theological approach, and introduced the idea of natural law, the political thought of Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche would turn not into a reformist stance but, because of its ahistoricity, into an explicitly revolutionary one.

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we come to see it as the first rebirth of Sophistry after Christianity, which is also the first appearance of the atheist; it is an inversion of the whole historical line of development of skepticism up to Montaigne – which had been characterized by eschewing irreligion – by a sort of rediscovery of the irreligious side of Sophistry. It is a transition, in some way, from Bruno’s “immanent divine” to atheism because undoubtedly it marks a skeptical turn in a process that starts in Bruno and in his union of the themes of Renaissance Aristotelian naturalism with those of a form of Neo-Platonism tending to religious syncretism, which had been part of humanism, and which the Counter-Reformation had discarded when it picked up its legacy.59 Thus the precise theoretical adversary, apart from any practical-religious intention, against which Descartes’s philosophy took shape was Renaissance naturalism at the last stage of its process. Indeed, if we interpret the thought of Descartes in light of the experience of freedom, we will undoubtedly reconstruct his theses in a form that sets them in opposition, essentially and primarily, to libertine thought. When it is associated with the experience of freedom, Cartesian doubt manifests itself as an operation aimed at overturning the skeptical doubt which “produces itself,” which is the mere repercussion in me of a broadening of my experience. The affirmation of my transcendence with respect to the world, which my capacity to cast doubt on it manifests, implies the denunciation of naturalistic dogmatism, which underpins the skeptical doubt (and it is precisely the unity of skepticism, materialism, and atheism that characterizes the libertine doubt). Moreover, how else can we define the process of the Meditations, if not as the reconquest of the shared vision of the world characterized by the convictions that the soul is substantially united with the body and that the external world is real – whose effective negation according to Descartes is definitely a folly – by making explicit the ontological affirmations that are this vision’s foundations (substantial reality of the I and existence and transcendence of God)? The same process of thought that makes

59 A study – which would be even more interesting if conducted at the level of ideas and not only in terms of the historical data – of the relationship between the dissolution of Bruno’s philosophy (failure of his attempt to preserve religion within philosophy, of his politics, etc.) and the birth of libertine atheism is still lacking, and would be enormously interesting from the perspective I have drawn. Without a doubt, other influences soon entered the very complex history of libertinism, but the initial kernel and the reason of its birth are found there and nowhere else.

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it possible to found his new physics reduces the atheist to an insipiens, in the sense of ignorant (he cannot have certainty even about mathematical truths) and crazy (he cannot have certainty even about the affirmations of common sense). Let us further notice that affirming the primary role of the anti-libertine motive in the genesis of his philosophy does not coincide at all with identifying the core of his work with some apologetic intention and, even less, with attempting to reduce his philosophy to a continuation of Augustinian and scholastic themes. In actuality, in the first place he was sensitive to the aspect of libertinism whereby it was theoretical skepticism; and it seemed to him that his philosophy objectively acquired an apologetic meaning because of the correlation between the critique of skepticism and that of materialism and atheism. This meaning was not different – nor did he present things otherwise, on close inspection – from the one that the scholastic doctors he knew (i.e., essentially, the doctors of the Second Scholastic) had attributed to Aristotelian philosophy: the self-presentation as preambula fidei by a philosophy that had constituted itself in the search of truth as a “natural value.” But, on the other hand, anti-libertinism linked him to the thinkers of the 1600s for whom the specifically religious question was central and who perceived the scholastic position to be inadequate: the Port-Royalists and Malebranche. (2) But precisely because it was a mere inversion of the libertine position, it included a concession, in opposition, to the libertines: to their philosophy based on “erudition” it opposed a philosophy separated from history; to the political character of their thought it opposed a sharp separation of philosophy and religion from politics. In this separation the thought of the theoreticians of the Reason of State was at the same time preserved and transfigured, in Pascal and Malebranche by inserting it into Augustinian pessimism, and in Descartes by criticizing Machiavelli, a critique that proposed to shift the attention from the case of the illegitimate Prince to that of the legitimate Prince, from the foundation of states to their preservation. In light of this, the suitable formula to describe the significant structure of Cartesianism is that of separate interiority or of dissociation of the spiritual life from politics and from history. (3) Therefore, the concept of historical periodization that applies to Cartesianism is that of anti-Renaissance, with the addition that it is  Catholic anti-Renaissance in as much as it operates within the

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acceptance of that general intuition that I used earlier to define the Catholic Reformation. Within this horizon it fights against its internal adversary, the heir of Renaissance heresy, libertinism; even though this will lead it to a lack of communication and then, ultimately, to a conflict with the first form of philosophy of the Catholic Reformation, directed against the external Protestant adversary, Spanish Scholastics. We must also add that, regarding the philosophy of the 1600s we can speak of anti-Renaissance only in reference to Cartesianism. Conversely, in Spinoza and in Leibniz, and if you like even in Berkeley, we have the renewal of a link with the Renaissance.60 (4) In connection with this structure we understand the particular character with which freedom is experienced by Descartes. Essentially, he experiences it as power of negativity; however, not in the Hegelian sense of an activity that denies the given but in the sense of freedom to distinguish myself, to recognize myself as an irreducible reality. One should carefully consider, in this regard, Descartes’s language: why, for example, the idea of substance evokes in him not the image of a centre of activity but, rather, that of a separate reality. We shall see in a moment how important this experience of freedom as negativity is in the context of the theory of divine freedom. For now, let us just notice its ascetic aspect, which is why the natural form of expression of philosophy

60 Regarding this necessity of using the concept of anti-Renaissance to describe authentic Cartesian thinkers, see H. Gouhier, “Les deux XVIIe siècle,” in Congreso Internacional de Filosofia, Actas III (1949), 171–81, and Les premières pensées de Descartes: Contribution a l’histoire de l’Anti-Renaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1958), 9. The extraordinary importance of the libertine moment (of what, for France, was the “envers du siècle des saints”) has been highlighted by the book by R. Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943). It is a fundamental work on the history of culture and yet is rather weak on the philosophical side. In my work “La crisi libertina e la Ragion di Stato,” in Atti del II Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, Roma 1952 (Milan: Bocca, 1953), I tried to highlight the extremely important suggestions that the exact description of the libertine movement contributed to the history of philosophy as well as the new questions that arose, in the history of philosophy, as a result of an adequate appreciation of this crisis. Based on a consideration of the results achieved by Pintard’s work and by that (already cited) of Lenoble, I thought I could conclude that the appearance within the horizon of mechanistic physics of that “metaphysical accident” that is the philosophy of Descartes can only be explained by the full awareness he had of the importance of libertine skepticism, unlike Mersenne, whose criticism concerned only Renaissance science, which by then had been abandoned by the libertines.

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becomes meditation. It is precisely in reference to this ascetic aspect that the “meditative” Malebranche saw in Cartesian thought the type of Christian philosophy. It is now a matter of looking within this structure at the very peculiar relationship, of opposition and unity that exists between Descartes and Pascal.

7. THE CRISIS OF MOLINISM IN DESCARTES About the objectively (i.e., apart from his intentions and convictions) religious meaning of the philosophy of Descartes, I believe it is fair to say that, after its interpretation in terms of philosophy of freedom, we have now reached definitive results.61 We need to pose two distinct questions: (a) is there objectively in Descartes’s philosophy room not only for religious revelation but also for the dogmas that define the essence of Christianity? (b) Since, as a philosophy of freedom, Cartesianism is fundamentally a theory about the “direction of attention,” we may wonder whether, in the form it takes in Descartes, it can not only fulfill the task of providing theses that are objectively a preamble to faith but also do the work of showing that religion is “the most important.” A. We can answer the first question quite simply by pointing out that an essential element of his philosophy is the rejection of the thesis that religion is a surrogate of philosophy, in any form this thesis can take,

61 In the following sense: the reasons in favour of the religious interpretation have been collected and presented in definitive form by Laporte, Le rationalisme, 299–468. The reasons in favour of a secular interpretation – in an intelligent form, and evaluating the arguments that would support a religious interpretation  – are provided, in a manner that I think can hardly be improved, in the book I cited by Alquié, which is at the same time historical and theoretical. I present the two positions, albeit loosely, in points A and B. In point C I try to surpass them, giving them their due, in an interpretation that to me seems well founded. Regarding older literature, we should never forget Gouhier’s Pensée religieuse de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1924) and Laberthonnière’s Études sur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1935) (but the fundamental studies on religion had already been published between 1909 and 1911). Maritain’s interpretations is very similar to that of Laberthonnière. As for Goldmann, we can say that by opposing the rationalism of Descartes to the tragic vision of Pascal he follows an interpretation very similar to Laberthonnière’s, but quite impoverished.

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be it Spinoza’s or that of natural religion, or the Machiavellian and libertine. Because, by the principle of divine freedom and the meditation on the infinite “beyond reason,” it seems that Descartes joins the greatest critic of that theory who ever existed – Pascal. Because, furthermore, the study of Malebranche can be used to illustrate that the openness to Revelation endures if one abandons the theory of divine freedom in the sense of Descartes but keeps his theory of human freedom; and the study of Spinoza can be used to illustrate that abandoning this openness coincides with entirely suppressing the theme of freedom. Nor can one find, upon close inspection, any Cartesian thesis that contradicts religious truth. Certainly not his theory of the state of infancy, première et principale cause de nos erreurs,62 a confluence of anti-naturalism, anti-historicism, and anti-Aristotelianism. This is because this condition of man can be interpreted very easily – from a higher point of view that only Revelation can make known to us – as a consequence of the Fall. The theme behind this theory – together with the theme of attention, to which it is evidently very tightly linked – is the only one about which all the thinkers of religious Cartesianism are in agreement (it is the theme that makes them take the side of the “moderns” in the famous Querelle, the theme whose acceptance defines, expressly, religious Cartesianism). Just think, for instance, of the form in which the “Cartesian revolution” is accepted by Pascal in the famous fragment 72: “Hence it comes that almost all philosophers have confused ideas of things, and speak of material things in spiritual terms, and of spiritual things in material terms.” Or think of the religious accent that in all Cartesians – including Malebranche (his famous passage “De l’erreur la plus dangereuse de la philosophie des anciens,” in Recherche de la Verité, bk. VI, p. II, ch. III is typical), Arnauld, and Nicole – accompanies the critique of substantial forms and of hidden qualities, which are precisely the notions whose psychological genesis the Cartesian thesis of the state of infancy intends to clarify. Because for these thinkers this critique means that one and the same process leads to attaining rigorous science and to detecting in man the presence of the traces of original sin, it is the true condition for the transition to a “Christian” philosophy, to be framed as a victory of Augustinianism over Aristotelianism. And the fact that Cartesian philosophy presents itself with respect to

62 The title of article 71 of the first part of the Principles.

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Aristotelian philosophy not as a development or as surpassing/preserving but as negation takes the meaning of a necessary radical opposition between a philosophy that makes room for sin and one that assumes man’s fallen condition to be his normal condition and derives its assertions from this presupposition. Nor can those who favour a religious interpretation feel much challenged by arguments drawn from the study of Descartes as a moralist. In fact, it is not hard to spot, at the bottom of the analysis provided by secular commentators, the implicit presupposition that only the position that values worldly things exclusively as instruments for salvation is a religious position. This is the same thesis that motivates so much resistance to the recognition of a “Christianity of the humanists.” It is also the basis of the idea of the practical and political nature of the Counter-Reformation, precisely as a compromise with humanism. This simply because a historian cannot not recognize the factual existence of a Molinist Christianity, to which one must refer in order to understand the religious thought of Descartes. People say that metaphysics is just one part of his work, which is principally directed towards science and technology. But we must keep in mind that the early decades of the 1600s are those when the perspective of the previous century is turned upside down; when the irreligious temptation presents itself for the first time under the guise of erudition, and when, by contrast, the equation irreligion = anti-science establishes itself, also for the first time, and the type of the “Christian scientist” makes its appearance in history. According to Descartes, a science founded on a divine guarantee (and thus allied to religion and not, like magic, to forms of heretical thought) allows me also to realize from a practical standpoint my true situation, that to which God has destined me, with respect to things. I related, in the third essay, Laberthonnière’s theses about the Christian origins, in Descartes, of the technical mindset. By placing the question of wisdom at the centre of the exposition of his thought, in his final period, and by giving the impression of replacing the movement of metaphysics towards theology with the movement towards science and towards perfecting earthly life, did Descartes manifest an axiological meaning that he attributed to them? We can think more simply that he adapted his exposition, trying to find common interests, to a new audience that he could reasonably expect to be more open to understanding his truth because untrammelled by the systematic formalization of prejudices found in Aristotelian philosophy. We can

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also think that this quest to bring new listeners to assent to his philosophy starting from their natural questions led him to bring to the fore an approach in which morals are treated from the eudemonological perspective, or actually, more precisely, from the perspective of happiness in this life; which does not authorize us to speak of a general naturalistic character of his ethics, except in the sense that natural values are licit in their order. And perhaps when Descartes shows that the philosophy that best serves the glory of God is also the philosophy most suitable to addressing the need for wisdom and happiness that worldly people pursue in this life, what comes to mind is the pupil of the Jesuits rather than the man of the Enlightenment.63 B. However, things change when we consider the philosophy of Descartes from the standpoint of the direction of attention. The strange paradox of his religious thought seems to be this: his philosophy undoubtedly serves an apologetic function for those who are already believers in as much as it shows them that every rational motivation to abandon religious tradition is contradictory; regarding the adversaries of his time, this applies to the arguments of the libertines and the advocates of natural religion. But it does not follow that it can be presented as a philosophy that moves towards religion and predisposes one to religious conversion, even though it keeps, from Augustinianism, the accent of being a philosophy of conversion. It directs the attention of the unbeliever not to the aspect whereby, while being an autonomous philosophy, it is open to the truths that are useful for salvation, but to the power of negativity whereby I can break my dependence on history and become capable of an absolutely new beginning, and to the conjunction of such negativity with the idea of man’s dominion over nature. This is an attitude that, as I already pointed out, seemingly cannot be completely realized except by getting rid of all references to the supernatural; by reconciling, therefore, with the adversaries I just mentioned (and, in fact, what else is the Enlightenment if not this reconciliation?). The “libertine” adversary will be led by reading Descartes to become a man of the Enlightenment, not to convert to Christianity;64 and to 63 Gouhier’s La pensée religieuse de Descartes is still fundamental to the illustration of this last period of his life and thought. 64 The book by A. Vartanian, Diderot e Descartes, is interesting in spite of its evident tendentiousness (eighteenth-century materialism as the fulfilment of the critical motif of Descartes!). At least it shows that even materialism, in order to achieve its

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erase, in order to highlight the conversion to the human, all aspects of Cartesian thought that can mean openness to religious truth – as happened historically. Thus, it is a philosophy to which all the formulas used to describe Augustinianism apply, which, however, stops being a philosophy of conversion precisely at the moment when it presents itself as religious philosophy. A philosophy that is religious according to his theses objectively considered, which, however, generates a spiritual disposition that hampers the transition from natural truths to revealed truths. The paradox becomes even more peculiar when we observe that the origin of the secular moment lies expressly in the most religious themes: the theory of human freedom and that of divine freedom. Consider, indeed: the philosophy of Descartes possesses the Augustinian tone of a philosophy of conversion. It takes as its natural expressive form that of meditation – that is, it transposes into philosophy a process typical of religious spirituality. But conversely, it does not include the briefest reflection on sin and on the Incarnation. Therefore, it seems that through doubt, the relinquishing of prejudices, the method, it makes possible liberation from my past, from the burden of a nature still subject to sensitivity; that, as pure philosophy, it can restore man’s freedom from what traditionally had been thought to be the consequences of sin. In short, it seems to call into question “man’s situation viewed in light of original sin.”65 Let us read Descartes from the point of view of this lack of reference to the Fall and the Incarnation. The connection between the exaltation of human freedom and the dismissal, or at least the minimization, of the themes of sin and Incarnation – thus, of the dogmas of which Christian religion properly consists, according to Augustine’s well-known judgment – has an ancient name in the history of religious thought: Pelagianism. In fact, it turns out that this charge was already brought against him by the Port-Royalist theologian who was best disposed towards him – Arnauld. But let us explore this remark more deeply. It seems that Descartes dissociated Pelagianism from the aspect whereby it appeared to be the last defence of ancient rationalism and naturalism; that he ran into it, in other words, by an extreme radicalization of modern form, has to go back to Descartes; which is yet another proof that the figure of the “Cartesian beginning” is ineliminable. 65 On these points, see F. Alquié, La découverte, 241–5.

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Augustinian anti-rationalism and of the Christian idea of man’s transcendence with respect to nature (of man as freedom and not as nature). Thus, Pelagius comes back via a transposition of attention from the past to the future and, in the final analysis, to the realization of a humanity that science and technology will make free. By this transposition, the last bond between Pelagianism and Christianity is broken: that “relationship of imitation of Christ through the docile reproduction in the disciple of the image of the master; the submission to his divine model of humility, poverty and perfection,” as the most recent historian of Pelagius has written.66 Thus, all the formulas that have been used to describe Augustinian philosophy apply to that of Descartes: philosophy of conversion, of second birth, of interiority, and so on. But religious conversion has been replaced by a conversion to the human. It is all too easy to give this position a name: the Enlightenment. Moreover, in reference to a remark by Alquié, who said that the eighteenth-century criticism of man’s situation as a result of original sin is more radical but also less deep, we must not think, when we talk about Descartes anticipating the Enlightenment, that there is a germ in his work that later will need a more suitable climate in order to develop; nor must we think that there are sporadic features that will only become a coherent organism in a further position. In a certain sense, it seems that paradoxically we must say that in Descartes there is, albeit blocked by an attempt at reconciliation with the past, the Enlightenment position in its entirety, in the form that many people think of implementing today, more rigorous than the eighteenth-century form because freed from the physicalist ontology and from scientism. It is quite easy to trace back to this “new Pelagianism” detected in the theory of human freedom the features that lend themselves even more to depict Descartes the moral philosopher as a precursor of the Enlightenment. The essential traits can be the following. The study of the late Descartes highlights the limitations of his critique of sensitivity, which is only directed at demonstrating sensitivity’s lack of scientific value and inability to tell us what bodies are. Therefore, the “disincarnation of the spiritual” described in the Meditations is not associated at all with the practical ideal of the liberation of the soul from the body. The

66 G. de Plinval, Pélage (Lausanne: Payot, 1953), 156.

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intellectual ascesis necessary for knowledge is thus freed from any mystical significance. It is, instead, the condition to found a science that allows us to go back to sensitive reality in the position not of subject but of “maître et possesseur,” thus realizing a higher wisdom than the resigned wisdom of the stoics and the Epicureans. Having pushed to the limit in his theory of knowledge one of the possibilities of Platonism seems to provide him with the foundation needed in order to push to the limit, from the standpoint of practice, a form of Aristotelianism (as definition of the good in relation to the unity of the human composite) completely cut off from every relationship with Platonism because of the abandonment of the contemplative ideal of wisdom.67 But by doing so he seems to clarify the meaning he attributed to his philosophy, making precise the general axiological inversion to which it is tied. Indeed, (a) the question of the good is posed in completely different terms from that of the true, rigorously eudemonistic and worldly; (b) consequently, the enhancement of our life here below is what gives value to rigorous science, and the function of guaranteeing this science is what gives value to metaphysics; metaphysics and science do not seem to have value except as instruments for an increase in perceptible life; (c) in relation to this general axiological inversion, in this last period the philosophical-theological themes of the earlier works seem to become an instrument to establish the idea of a separate wisdom and the total distinction between religion and philosophy. The theory of divine freedom, by providing a foundation to the thesis that ends are impenetrable, contributes to making possible a quest for béatitude naturelle, separated from all references to a transcendent destiny or to the idea of human cooperation in the realization on this earth of God’s ends. This seems to bring to light the constant presence in his thought of a dissociation, even if it is never explicitly formulated, between Godprinciple (of human knowledge and of existing things; and thus a guarantee of the validity of science and of its application to what exists) and God-end, which he does not seem at all interested in considering; a dissociation, therefore, between “philosophical” God and “religious” God, and at this point it seems that we can truly understand, illustrating

67 The secular and “almost atheistic” character of Descartes’s ethics has been greatly emphasized by Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons t. 2 (Paris: Aubier, 1953) .

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it with the example of Cartesian wisdom, Pascal’s thesis regarding the proximity of deism and atheism. C. These two readings are both possible because the secular reading cannot suppress the very valid reasons for the religious reading, and vice versa. Hence the constant alternating of the two opposite interpretations in the history of Cartesian literature; hence also the impression that the thought of Descartes needs to be unblocked by removing some element that prevents its consistency, not only logically but above all ethically and religiously. But in what form of thought can his novelty (i.e., the negations he pronounced and the integrality of his metaphysical theses) be preserved? We must speak of an essential ambiguity that does not stem, as we have seen, from a logical contradiction in his theses objectively considered, and that cannot even be traced back to a psychological ambiguity, since there is no doubt that Descartes was able to feel, in good conscience, that he had always stayed faithful to the Molinist type of Catholicism whence he had started. In a work of mine,68 I tried to explain this with the friction between the novelty of his position and a presupposed Molinist spiritual disposition within which he had thought it. Let us then consider Molinism not from the strict point of view of theological formulas but in its original inspiration, and in the order of the cultural values that follow from it (i.e., from the point of view of the philosophy of history and culture). It represents humanistic theology: against the correlation between the Protestant negation of man and what to Catholic theologians seemed a degradation of God to mere arbitrary and irrational power, it opposes the unity between the defence of the principle of divine goodness and that of humanism. Having made the idea of divine goodness the central theme, what follows is an interpretation of God’s glory, which is not found in the predestination of the elect but in creating us and in our exercise of free activity. This solidarity between the celebration of divine goodness and the affirmation of human freedom takes the form of a precise distinction between God’s and man’s shares in the work of salvation, against Protestantism, in an opposition that is the more rigid for taking place after having granted the conception that grace and human will are principles exterior to each other. Therefore, the opposition to

68 “La crisi del molinismo in Descartes,” which I partially reproduce here.

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Protestantism becomes at the same time an unintended separation from Thomism and from every previous Christian concept. By reason of this type of defence of freedom, it is permissible to view Molinism as an assertion in theological terms of human autonomy. The endpoint of this process is the idea of the state of pure nature in which man could have been created, and to which he finds himself brought back by the loss, as a consequence of sin, of the gratuitous supernatural gifts. Translated in terms of cultural values, this thesis means that there is an autonomous order of natural values and that there is a natural morality of which supernatural morality represents the crown but that, strictly speaking, could be thought to be sufficient. That is, the repercussion on the cultural plane of the theological “giving God and man their shares” is a relative separatism between the values of temporal and religious life. Such separatism is counter-balanced by the thesis of the absolute gratuitousness of the supernatural. The form of religiosity that follows from this preoccupation to rigorously distinguish the orders is thus not based on “participation” but on distance between God and man. The quest for participation is replaced by the sense of our essential contingency, of our humility as creatures: submission to divine majesty and recognition of the gratuitousness of the gift. Recognizing natural values in their order leads to abandoning whatever still remained in Medieval Christianity of a tendency to dualistic ascesis, to the ideal of liberation from the world; and recognizing our condition as creatures, after having abandoned, together with the idea of participation, the idea of our cooperation with God’s ends, means in practice a commitment to carry out an exact action in the situation in which God has placed us. Divine goodness, human freedom, correlation between the affirmation of God and that of natural values: these are also the essential moments of the philosophy of Descartes. Regarding the central role of the idea of divine goodness, just think of the theme of divine veracity and its justification. How can it be deduced rationally from perfection, if this latter is understood as absolute indetermination and free creation of truths? If, therefore, veracity is defined not as respect of an order of truths pre-existent to God’s will but as a perfection of divine will itself since it creates truth?69 Reconciling this thesis and the free creation of

69 See H. Gouhier, Essais sur Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1937), 191–6.

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truths leads to difficulties, and the judgment that they are insurmountable is the logical justification of Malebranchism. I do not want to discuss now if they are truly insurmountable. But what is certain from the historical point of view is that this difficulty was not felt at all by Descartes. God the creator of eternal truths is followed immediately by God who is truthful because he is perfect, the guarantor of natural truths and of the accord between natural and supernatural light, in a connection that for Descartes does not need logical justification. That is, the voluntaristic theme has been inserted without mediation into a preexistent conception of divine goodness, which cannot be deduced from it. Thus, Descartes fully accepted all the implications of Molinist thought regarding the order of human values. Is not his conception of the autonomy of philosophy also derived from Molinism, and does this not provide an explanation of his assurance about the Catholic orthodoxy of this position? The first consequence of the theory of the state of pure nature in which God, if he had so desired, could well have created man is evidently the autonomy of philosophy, understood in the sense that the philosopher, as pure philosopher, does not need to be concerned with the status naturae lapsae.70 What I find myself in now is the natural state in which man could have been created: only from revelation can I learn that it is a decadence and that God had destined me to a better state. What must be required of a philosophy for it to call itself Christian is only the recognition that the Revelation is possible, and the Cartesian texts are fully consistent with this conception. Now, I think that it is precisely as a result of this accepted and not criticized Molinist presupposition that the secular aspects of the thought of Descartes take shape. It really does not take much insight to realize that there must be friction between the presupposition and the novelty. Molinism is the rediscovery, for theological reasons, of a form of Thomism that emphasizes its Aristotelian aspect to the extreme in a polemics against the Augustinian aspects accepted by the Reformation. In short, it represents the extreme form of “Christian naturalism.” Moreover, or as a consequence, its consideration of the problem of evil is of an essentially justificatory nature. It is a matter of answering the following question: 70 The text of the Entretien avec Burman is extremely significant in this regard: “philosophus, naturam ut et hominem solum considerat, prout jam est, nec ulterius eius causas investigat, quia haec illum superant” (Adam et Tannery edition, t. 5, p. 178).

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What must we think in order to recognize God as the supreme goodness? Molina’s Concordia marks the beginning of a process of thought that reaches its climax, perhaps, in Leibniz’s Teodicea.71 Conversely, Cartesianism is the initially unaware rediscovery,72 for philosophical reasons, of a form of Augustinianism cut off from any development that might somehow reconcile it with Thomism. It is the farthest point reached by anti-naturalism: therefore it handles evil, which it encounters in the guise of error (but people have correctly remarked that it extends to error what the theological tradition used to say about sin) in a typically agonistic fashion. Let us also observe that the concessions it makes to its adversaries are symmetrical: the Molinist idea of rigorously distinguishing, for the sake of saving human freedom, between God’s and man’s part in the work of salvation is a concession to Protestantism; Cartesian anti-historicism is a concession to libertinism. Precisely because of this symmetry, Thomism in the Molinist and Suarezian version, and Augustinism in the Cartesian version are irreconcilably opposed. In my judgment, this radical heterogeneity between Molinist naturalism and Cartesian anti-naturalism is precisely the source of the ambiguity I mentioned. It is precisely why the secular interpretation of Descartes seems to be supported by a consideration of his attitude and the religious one by the interpretation and reconstruction of his doctrines as a consistent whole.73 This view of a heterogeneity seems confirmed by history: by the fact that all the thinkers of religious Cartesianism abandoned the

71 As far as I know, the peculiar symmetry between the position of Leibniz with respect to Spinoza and that of Molina and Jesuitic theology with respect to the Reformation has not been studied yet. Leibniz involves in his critique of Spinozism the critique of Cartesian theological arbitrarism (because the absolute indetermination of the Cartesian God seems to him to be on the verge of turning upside down into the absolute necessity of the Spinozian God) and that of Protestant theological arbitrarism. Hence the great admiration he felt for the theologians of Spanish scholastics. 72 Indeed it is absolutely unlikely that Descartes read St Augustine. See Gouhier, La pensée, 290; and G. Lewis, Le problème de l’incoscient et le cartesianisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 33–5. 73 An indirect, but full, confirmation of this judgment can be found in Laporte’s own treatment. Indeed, when he illustrates Descartes’s position regarding the relationship between religion and morals (i.e., a topic in which his original attitude comes to light), he cannot help recognizing that the thought of Descartes is frankly oriented in a Molinist direction. Vice versa, in the fairly rare passages in which he

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idea of the state of pure nature, even Malebranche, whose theological thought in some respects does present affinities with Molinism.74 In fact, suppose that we realize this anti-naturalism while keeping the idea that philosophy, as pure philosophy, is not concerned with the status naturae lapsae. Because of the dissociation between the point of view of nature and the point of view of truth, the state of nature – which Molinism depicted in Aristotelian terms as that in which man in his condition as a being composed of soul and body can enjoy a natural truth – becomes the state of pragmatist sensualism and infantile egocentrism, from which man must free himself in order to enter into the truth; that state of infancy that, as has been perfectly written recently,75 constitutes in the eyes of Descartes a sort of original sin with respect to knowledge. Sin is thus inserted back into a philosophy conceived as autonomous according to a model that, as we have seen, descended from Molinist premises. But I can triumph over this sin just by exercising what seems to be, at least as long as I stop at a purely philosophical consideration, my pure freedom, without the intervention of other powers. That is, the Pelagian aspects that I mentioned before appear; and the psychological hurdles, which I also mentioned, against the transition to an objectively possible further religious consideration are produced. Actually, what is produced is a deep-seated antagonism against such transition: because the religious position distracts my attention from the future and from the realization of my natural perfection, and shifts it towards the past and history. Let us also consider, briefly, the inversion that befalls the theme of divine freedom, in which we can see the most religious moment of the philosophy of Descartes. It is the point where his critique of libertinism reaches its Averroistic conclusion, in the negation of the idea of the unity of reason in God and in man. It is very easy to understand addresses theological questions, or questions about the nature of theology (i.e., problems in which he must start from the novel aspect of his thought), his orientation is towards Port-Royalist thought. 74 About this rejection, which Malebranche links explicitly to his core thesis, that of Order, and thus to his reform of Cartesianism, see Laporte, Les Vérités de la Grâce, t. 2 no. 44 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1923), 44; and H. Gouhier, La philosophie de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1926), 194–6. 75 H. Gouhier, “Doute or negation méthodique?,” in Les études philosophiques (1954), 141 (now reprinted in La pensée metaphysique de Descartes [Paris: Vrin, 1962], ch. 1)

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the connection between its immediate consequences – limitation of the speculative character of philosophy, impenetrability of God’s ends, impossibility of argumentative theology – and the axiological inversion that I mentioned speaking of the late Descartes. The secular trait appears at the end of a sequence of negations conditioned by it: no longer a preamble to theology, no longer directed at contemplative wisdom, metaphysics will take the appearance of an introduction to science, which, in connection with the impenetrability of divine ends, will not derive its value from its contemplative aspect but will be, in turn, an introduction to a wisdom that is also separated, and so on. That is, the most religious theme of Cartesian thought, inserted into the context I described, becomes what makes it possible to expand “separatism” to the highest degree; and this explains why most of the time it has been considered by historians a mere gimmick to signify in theological terms the autonomy of science from theology. In summary, in Molinism the precise distinction of orders had the function of making the assertion of human autonomy and that of the absolute gratuitousness of the supernatural coincide. The introduction of an entirely different content of thought into the conception of philosophy born from that presupposition results in an inversion, so that, while both elements are preserved, autonomy comes to the forefront.

8. FROM DESCARTES TO PASCAL The question that we must now pose to ourselves is whether Pascal’s thought represents not anti-Cartesianism sic et simpliciter but, rather, the continuation of Descartes’s thought totally separated from the presupposed Molinism in which the novelty of Descartes was inserted. Clearly, this also throws into the sharpest relief the opposition of attitudes; because, how could it be greater than between a philosophy lived by a Molinist tending to rationalism for the reasons I already said, and that same philosophy lived, instead, by the most intransigent among the Port-Royalists? But this opposition takes place within a continuity. It may seem a paradox, but it is not. Let us eliminate all appearances thereof. Scholars have already proven perfectly well that, for Pascal, the impossibility of proving God’s existence is one aspect of the impossibility of metaphysics as a science, and the impossibility of metaphysics as a science is a consequence of the impossibility of the state of pure

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nature.76 A Christian thinker who thinks of constructing a metaphysics that may serve as a preamble to the revealed truths, while being autonomous from them, is already going down a road on which he can only be defeated by rationalist thought in its two forms (deism and atheism) and in their sequence. For having developed to its extreme consequences the criticism of the state of pure nature, we can say that Pascal’s position is the extreme form of that of the Port-Royalists. What does all of this have to do with Descartes, you will ask? His position is the affirmation of a metaphysics as science, Pascal’s position is a religious critique of metaphysics. These two points of view could not be farther apart. Therefore, we will have to prove that the Pascalian critique of metaphysics is also the most rigorous development of what was most new in the philosophy of Descartes. Let us observe that in the thought of Descartes there is, and remains unsolved, the problem of the transition from speculative and disinterested sciences, whose object is unrelated to concupiscence, and which therefore is perfectly accessible to our intelligence, to the knowledge of God and his law, for which the situation is very different. Relative to these two orders of truth, the question becomes qualitatively different because the truths that science presents to us are instrumental truths; they cannot direct us to any ends (Pascal will solve the question by distinguishing “l’ordre de la raison” from “l’ordre du coeur”). It is as if in Port-Royalist thought there was an aspiration towards an apology of Christianity in accord with the “critical spirit, (i.e., addressed to those already convinced, where for those doctors the critical spirit coincided with the Cartesian spirit). And, of course, there is also the aspiration to a separation, which they thought to be possible, of Cartesianism from Pelagianism, whose presence they had been the first to detect (that Descartes’s epistolary was filled with such Pelagianism was Arnauld’s opinion; and Pascal’s famous sentence about Descartes who would have liked to do without God [fr. 77] is just a strong expression of this criticism). So, it is not the case that the Port-Royalists directly intended to solve a problem that was objectively open in the philosophy of Descartes and that had been left unsolved. But they encountered it in the sense that 76 See the very important pages 421–2 in the book I cited by Russier; and, more generally, the entire last chapter, Pascal au délà de Port-Royal; Les preuves de Dieu, 403ff, in which the difference between Pascal and Arnauld and Nicole, who still upheld the value of the rational proofs of the existence of God, is highlighted.

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they posed to themselves, in Cartesian terms, the question of the direction of attention towards religious truths. Furthermore, there was a precise thesis of Descartes that had already led him away from the strictly theological theses of Molinism (except for implicitly preserving the idea of the state of pure nature and his general spiritual disposition) and pushed him towards the Port-Royalist conception of theology; namely, the thesis of divine freedom and infinity. Indeed, it makes impossible and unacceptable the idea of different orders of possibles and futuribles with respect to which the divine will exercises its choice, which is the foundation of the theory of scientia media. Thus, regarding this question Descartes was forced to go back to the Thomist thesis that action is not divided between divine causality and ours but, rather, is inseparably all ours and all God’s. We can add that he was fully aware that the Thomist solution was obligatory for his thought, as shown irrefutably by a passage in the letter to Elizabeth of 6 October 645, in which, even if Molina’s name does not appear, there is an explicit rejection of the thesis that separates him from Thomism: that God is only a “partial cause” in the determination of our will; and by another passage in the Entretien avec Burman, and also by testimonies by Baillet and Leibniz.77 Given this, however, we must also notice, and it is a paradoxical aspect of his thought that deserves attention, that this encounter with a Thomist idea takes place starting from a thesis (divine freedom) that is the exact antithesis of the Thomist one and that marks his departure from scholastics; or, better, a thesis that is the exact inverse of the form that the Thomist thesis had taken in Suarezism;78 while, on the other hand, all possibilities of going back to Thomism are precluded by the fact that Descartes keeps the Suarezian thesis about the relation of essence and existence whence this new form followed.79 If it were developed in an organic fashion, this marginal encounter with St Thomas would, because of the theological thesis I mentioned, lead Cartesianism on the road to Port-Royalism. Observe that Arnauld had already been interested in this aspect. I do not believe we can find 77 Entretien avec Burman t. 5, 166; Baillet, Vie de M. Descartes (1691) t. 2, 516; Leibniz, Théodicée no. 365. 78 On this point, see Pierre Garin, Thèses cartésiennes et thèses thomistes (Paris: Desclée, 1931). 79 See Étienne Gilson, L’être et l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948), 156–60.

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any passage of his in which there is an explicit assent to this theory about the free creation of eternal truths. But certainly he accepted its presuppositions, considering the Cartesian theory from the angle of the idea of divine infinity and the radical non-distinction of intellect and will rather than from the angle of arbitrarism. He thereby gave this thesis a  completely different interpretation from that developed by the great ­systematic thinkers (and thus by the rationalist interpreters) of Cartesianism, which found in Leibniz its most complete and best-known expression.80 We can plausibly think that he viewed it from the perspective of freeing Thomism from every element that can bend it towards Molinism; and that therefore he viewed Cartesianism as the position that makes it possible to get Thomism unstuck from the elements that continue in Molinism, and to establish its exact continuity with Augustinianism; thus realizing, by freeing scholastic theology from scholastic philosophy, a convergence with the theological line of Saint-Cyran as a contraposition of positive theology to argumentative theology. Therefore, there is no paradox in wondering whether Pascal’s extreme form of Port-Royalism coincides, too, with a position of thought centred on the Cartesian theory of divine freedom and infinity: in the sense that this theory, pushed to its ultimate consequences, can lead to a critique of speculative metaphysics and to a transition from metaphysical reason to critical reason that is altogether different from the Kantian one, and which also explains why the words “fideism” and “skepticism” cannot be used to describe the thought of Pascal: “There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason. If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous” (fr. 272–3). 80 This is Laporte’s judgment, Les Vérités t. 2, 4–14 and 334–5n27. In this second reference he says that Arnauld’s opinion on this matter “is not different from that of Descartes correctly understood.” It would be interesting to examine the huge influence that the study of Arnault – which was the true discovery of a great thinker in a writer who is usually regarded as pedantic and mediocre – had on the formation of Laporte’s historical thought. It is such study that led him to consider “La finalité selon Descartes,” in Revue d’Histoire de la philosophie 2 (1928): 366–96; it was the first kernel of his study on “Liberté selon Descartes,” in Revue de Metaphysique 44 (1937): 37–87, which, from a certain angle, can be considered, with respect to divine freedom, as a rigorous elucidation of Arnault’s interpretation. Important traces of Arnauld’s views could also be discerned in Rationalisme de Descartes.

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Let us recall the general features of this Cartesian theory. I already highlighted its kinship with the theory of human freedom. Freedom, in God as well as in man, is the capacity to cause one’s own acts. But since God is pure unity and infinity, his freedom is not subordinate to anything, and so it is, inseparably, necessity and indifference. Conversely, man as a finite being finds the nature of truth and goodness already determined, established by God. Hence the distinction, in man, between knowing and willing, and the necessity that the will, which is infinite, conform to the intellect, which is finite, realizing somehow, in this conformity, the image of the unity of will and intellect that exists in God. This implies the affirmation of a complete heterogeneity between God’s reason and ours because of the unity in God, and the distinction in us, of will and intellect. The unity of intellect and will in God makes it impossible to say that the divine will is determined by a pre-existent order of truths and values. Therefore, the divine will must be said to be the free creator of eternal truths; which does not mean that it can be described in terms of pure arbitrarism because the term “arbitrarism” indicates that the will precedes the intellect. Thus, there is no similarity at all with the theses of Luther and Calvin, at least as they are usually interpreted, and as they were interpreted by the Port-Royalists,81 because, according to Descartes, for God videre and velle are the same thing. A corollary of this unity of intellect and will is the unity, incomprehensible to us, of necessity and indifference in God. In reference to God’s will, necessity is not at all comparable to logical and mathematical necessity, which is intimately permeable to our spirit and is the norm of all our deductions (we are, thus, at the antipodes of Spinozism). Substantially, then, what is being affirmed is the mysteriosity of God’s nature and the vanity of any attempt to reconcile the plurality of his attributes. It will be appropriate to linger a little longer on its genesis, on its absolute necessity for Descartes’s thought, on its existential character, since the interpretation that reduces it to a mere conceptual fiction (in order to guarantee the autonomy of non-teleological physics, or, in

81 See Laporte, Les Vérités, t. 2, 168ff, 344ff. Port-Royalists reject, in Protestantism, both theological arbitrarism and the negation of human free will. The “Catholic truth” resides for them in the re-establishment of the true relation between grace and freedom, altered by the Molinists because they accepted the Protestant separation between grace and freedom, merely inverting it, and consequently subjecting grace to the will.

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general, human autonomy etc.),82 or that views it, in any case, as an isolated thesis, with no direct connection with the others, is still so widespread. Therefore, we must consider the tight parallelism of the relation between cogito and sum, on the one hand, with the relation between the idea of God and the free creation of eternal truths, on the other. I cannot grasp my own existence except in a necessary connection with its essential attribute or essence; except in that example of necessary connection – namely, cogito ergo sum. For this reason the content of thought presents itself to me as the untranscendible; ideas appear to me as natures or essences – that is, as objects no less real and independent of my thought than physical objects. But if these are the characteristics of finite existence, how shall we think infinite existence? Evidently, only by an absolute inversion of what reason and experience teach us about man.83 As was already said, we experience freedom as a power of negativity, a power to suspend judgment until we reach something that resists this effort of negation. For God, who is not limited by anything, freedom will have to be identified with absolute creativity. The situation of this thesis in Descartes’s opus is extremely peculiar. It was supposed to occupy an absolutely central place in the sketch of metaphysics of 1629, according to the letter to Mersenne of 15 April 1630. In contrast, he does not discuss it in the major works, neither in the Discourse, nor in the Meditations, nor in the Principles, even though he holds it unchanged and keeps affirming it as essential – in a few ­passages, eight overall, the last time expressly in a letter to Arnauld of 29 July 1648. On the other hand, all his theses are related to it, except

82 An example of the first thesis is the book by Gilson La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: Alcan, 1913); of the second, the work already cited by Laberthonnière; Brehier’s thesis – “La création des vérités éternelles dans le système de Descartes,” in Revue Philosophique 5 (1937): 15-29  – comes close, in a different form, to that of Gilson: in his view the Cartesian theory guarantees that man can know essences integrally and without residue by reducing them to the rank of creatures. 83 The formula metaphysical inversion, which is not in Descartes, but which expresses his thought exactly, was recently introduced by Gouhier, La pensée metaphysique de Descartes, 221. As a form of univocity in reverse, it means that regarding the “discourse on God,” as Descartes understands it, one cannot speak either of univocity, or of analogy, or of simple equivocity, or, strictly speaking, of negative theology (see Gouhier, La pensée metaphysique de Descartes, 205–32). I believe there is no need to emphasize the capital importance of this thesis to illustrate the whole metaphysical and religious thought of Descartes.

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the ontological proof, so that Laporte, having started from the idea of valuing all Cartesian texts, linking them together and reconciling them, without neglecting any, had to arrive at a criticism, which I think is definitive, of the “rationalistic” interpretation of Descartes; so that Alquié, even though his interpretation is very different, could say that this thesis introduces the “metaphysical dimension” and thus the condition for a radical critique of scientism. This is not the place to investigate what motivated Descartes to talk so little about it, despite the value he attached to it. I think the reason is that to him it was the source of a doubt that he could not fully overcome, and that could be overcome in two opposite ways – that of Pascal and that of Malebranche. Let us see whether, by studying the two fragments (233 and 434) in which the reference to Descartes’s philosophy seems most evident, and the distinction sharpest, we are led to conclude that the distinction depends on the fact that Pascal pushed to the ultimate consequences the Cartesian theory of divine infinity. In this regard I would like to propose to follow a method that has never been used before: that of comparing the opposite positions (albeit within the same significant structure that I tried to define earlier) of Pascal and Malebranche. We must observe that the two points where Malebranche moves away from Descartes are the proofs of the existence of God and of the reality of the external world. These are also the two points where Pascal moves away from him – but in an absolutely opposite way. Indeed, Malebranche says that the ontological argument loses its value if one accepts the Cartesian theory of eternal truths. Pascal, instead, says that we cannot know either the existence or the nature of God. We have to ask whether we can see in Pascal a sort of answer ante litteram to Malebranche’s criticism. Descartes intends to reconcile the proofs of the existence of God with the thesis of divine freedom; Malebranche and Pascal affirm, for opposite reasons, their irreconcilability – Malebranche by developing the theme of the unity of the human soul with God, Pascal by developing that of the incommensurability between divine reason and human reason. In Malebranche’s critique of the Cartesian theory of eternal truths – developed for the first time in the X Eclaircissement of the Recherche de la vérité – Descartes is accused of having fallen back into the same libertinism of which his philosophy, correctly extended, should constitute, instead, the definitive refutation. Because is this God of pure power, not subject to an immutable Order, really different from Nature as

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conceived by the libertines? In Malebranche’s judgment, the consequences are the same: skepticism and amoralism. Because, if eternal truths and laws depend on God, who can assure us of the absolute value of our science?84 Moreover, who can say that subjecting the spirit to the body is a disorder, if we do not have a clear idea of an immutable and necessary moral order? And then, what proofs can be given of the fundamental truths of the Christian religion, sin and Redemption? But let us consider the question from the more particular angle of the proofs of the existence of God. From a Cartesian perspective ideas are created, and so the very idea of God is created. But nothing finite can represent the infinite: according to Malebranche, theo-centrism and the criticism of occult faculties unify in this principle. Having accepted it, clearly I cannot go from the idea to God: the intuition of God himself will be the transcendental condition of our knowledge. In conclusion, the value of the Cartesian ontological proof is tied to the meaning we give to the

84 Note the extreme importance of this aspect of Malebranche’s critique: because it concerns the possibility that Cartesian philosophy, without the correction he adds to it, may reduce to a form of psychologism, which to him is a position equivalent to skepticism; or, let us say, to skeptical historicism (different systems of truth and so on). This is the beginning of the famous opposition between Ontologism and psychologism on which the philosophy of Gioberti (who was the first one, apparently, to use the word “Ontologism”) is founded. In reference to more modern times, his critique anticipates Husserl’s critique of psychologism. In his magnificent work on Malebranche (Malebranche, 3 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1955–59), which is much superior, in my opinion, to his previous, and still very valuable, book on Descartes, Gueroult, stressing this parallelism, remarks: “he prefigures Bernard Bolzano, the inspirer of Husserl, who distinguishes propositions in themselves, and representations in themselves, and truths in themselves, from the knowledge whereby they become the thoughts of an I; who reckons that these entities would immutably go on being what they are, even if nobody were ever there to actually become aware of them” (2:9–10). In fact, the affinity between Malebranche and Bolzano, and the extreme importance of the polemics between Malebranche and Arnauld  – which takes place around the gnoseological consequences of how one frames the question of the relation between God and the eternal truths – for the initial formulation of the question of logicism and psychologism (which is actually evident, but which one is somewhat hesitant to point out, out of fear of looking anti-historical) had already been highlighted by P. Schrecker, “Le parallélisme théologico-mathématique chez Malebranche,” in Revue philosophique 125, nos. 3–4 (1938): 215–52. On the contrary, the proximity, to the point of almost or complete identity, between the gnoseological position of Arnauld and that of Franz Brentano has never been studied.

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Cartesian notion of the objective reality of ideas; to the distinction between ideas and the thinking subject, which is surreptitious in Descartes but is implicitly announced precisely in this concept. If, conversely, ideas are reduced to modes of the thinking subject, as Arnauld wants to do and as apparently Descartes himself often seems to say,85 the proof loses all validity. From the fact that necessary existence is included in our idea of God we can only draw the meagre conclusion that we think that God exists necessarily. In such a conception, shut inside the sphere of my own thought, I do find there the idea of God, and certainly I find it as something that I could not have produced; but this still cannot ensure in any way that it does not reduce to a regulatory principle devoid of ontological value. This difficulty dissipates completely only if we affirm the uncreated character of ideas; the ontological proof can only be consistent if the idea of God is elevated to God himself, if the idea of God is replaced by the vision in God, if proof is replaced by presence. Observe that this criticism truly brings us to the core of the whole Malebranchian revision of the philosophy of Descartes. The architecture of the system is not changed; the superposition of substances, the infinite substance and the finite, thinking, and extended substances all remain. The change is all inside and concerns the divine nature and the relation of the finite spirit with the infinite: the eternal truths are consubstantial with God instead of being created, and therefore innatism is replaced by vision in God. Also occasionalism depends on this replacement and, in a different respect, Malebranche’s Idealism as well.86

85 This is what Malebranche thinks, or says he thinks, but in fact there is no doubt that for Descartes ideas are modes of consciousness. 86 In fact, the Cartesian theory of the union of body and soul (see Laporte, Le rationalisme, 220ff) – which is not fully worked out, and yet is established in its essential lines and is fully consistent with the rest of his thought, and which anticipates in many respects that of Biran (“the motory efficacy of will is, for Descartes, as for Biran, a fact sui generis, independent of any reasoning and against which no reasoning could prevail,” Laporte, Le rationalisme, 228) – is compatible only with his idea of the limits of rationalism, signified in the thesis of divine infinity. If this idea is abandoned, occasionalism presents itself as a necessary solution. Regarding Idealism, which will be discussed again later, let it be enough now to observe that, in Malebranche, the theory of eternal truths is linked with the theory, which is affirmed for the first time in history, of the presentative and not representative character of ideas.

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Let us now move on to Pascal’s very famous fragment 233, Infini-rien (the pari), which has the exact same importance in the economy of the Pensées as does the X Enclaircissement in the philosophy of Malebranche: “The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing,” and here we might think we have found a point of agreement with Malebranche. But, let us keep reading: “So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a disproportion between our justice and that of God, as between unity and infinity.” And here Pascal agrees, instead, with Descartes on the idea of the heterogeneity between divine reason and ours. Let us go further: We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd … We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite, and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because He has neither extension nor limits. But by faith we know His existence; in glory we shall know His nature. Now, I have already shown that we may well know the existence of a thing, without knowing its nature … If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is … Let us then examine this point, and say, ‘God is, or He is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here.

It seems that in this passage Pascal develops the Cartesian thesis (clearly here we are talking about a relationship between essences, not direct historical influences; although Arnauld’s appreciation of it may have been known to Pascal) such as it can be reaffirmed after accepting, ante litteram, Malebranche’s future criticism. God’s absolute mysteriosity cannot be reconciled with a process wherein one deduces his existence from his essence considered in itself. Therefore, so to speak, the ideas of the infinite and the perfect become distinguished: the only infinite whose existence we know is the mathematical infinite, but we ignore its nature. But on the other hand this idea of the infinite and our impossibility to penetrate it warn us of the limitations of our knowledge, and of the possibility of a supra-rational knowledge. If we cannot

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prove the existence of God, we can at least recognize its possibility; hence the pari.87 It might seem (and we have seen that this is Goldmann’s fundamental objection to Laporte) that the thesis that reason is surpassed by natural things themselves opens up an unbridgeable chasm between the epistemologies of Descartes and Pascal. Now, this surpassing of reason by natural things reminds us of the famous sentence: “Nature sustains our feeble reason.” Let us place it back in the context of the fragment to which it belongs, number 434, the conclusion of Pascal’s critique of philosophy, observing that this critique takes the form of a remake of the process of Descartes’s Meditations after the collapse of the ontological argument and thus of the “chain of reasons.” The chief arguments of the sceptics – I pass over the lesser ones – are that we have no certainty of the truth of these principles apart from faith and revelation, except in so far as we naturally perceive them in ourselves. Now this natural intuition is not a convincing proof of their truth; since, having no certainty, apart from faith, whether man was created by a good God, or by a wicked demon, or by chance, it is doubtful whether these principles given to us are true, or false, or uncertain, according to our origin. Again, no person is certain, apart from faith, whether he is awake or sleeps, seeing that during sleep we believe that we are awake as firmly as we do when we are awake … I notice the only strong point of the dogmatists, namely, that, speaking in good faith and sincerely, we cannot doubt natural principles. Against this the skeptics set up in one word the uncertainty of our origin, which includes that of our nature. The dogmatists have been trying to answer this objection ever since the world began … What then shall man do in this state? Shall he doubt everything? Shall he doubt whether he is awake? … Shall he doubt whether he doubts? Shall he doubt whether he exists? We cannot go so far as that; and I lay it down as a fact that there never has been a real complete skeptic. Nature sustains our feeble reason, and prevents it raving to this 87 I can be brief on this point because the question of the idea of the Infinite with respect to knowledge, in Descartes and in Pascal, and of the consequent impossibility for the latter to talk about proofs of the existence of God, has already been studied masterfully in what may be the most beautiful of Laporte’s writings, Le coeur et la raison selon Pascal (Paris: Elzèvir, 1950), 33–7, 47–9. It is a posthumous reprinting of studies that had appeared in Revue philosophique in 1927, when its author had not yet fully explored the question of divine freedom in Descartes and Malebranche. For this reason, even though he perfectly captured the essential point, it still lacks the set of references that I have deemed necessary.

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extent … Shall he then say, on the contrary, that he certainly possesses truth – he who, when pressed ever so little, can show no title to it … Who will unravel this tangle? Nature confutes the skeptics, and reason confutes the dogmatists. What then will you become, O men! who try to find out by your natural reason what is your true condition? You cannot avoid one of these sects, nor adhere to one of them.

This fragment is extremely important because in it Pascal tackles the question of the “reality of the external world” in the solipsistic sense that is, at least virtually, proper to Cartesianism, and not in Berkeley’s merely immaterialistic sense. Here, too, a parallel with Malebranche (VI Eclaircissement sur la Recherche de la Vérité; VI Entrétien sur la Métaphysique) is clarifying. By developing the rationalist motif of Descartes’s Meditations, until he erases the hint to God as creator of the eternal truths seemingly contained in the conjecture of a deceitful God, Malebranche gets with great rigour to declare that the reality of the external world, including finite spirits, is rationally unprovable – because in matters of philosophy we must not believe anything except when evidence obliges us to – and to affirm the necessity of a (rationally justified) recourse to revelation. Pascal’s position is the exact opposite. A skeptic is such because he casts doubt on “natural intuition,” because he has the same idea of the truth as the dogmatists: he seeks “titles,” “convincing proofs” – in short, the “metaphysical foundation” of natural intuition. This presupposes abandoning the rationalist idea of truth, which is perfectly consistent with the more radical interpretation of the Cartesian thesis of divine freedom and infinity that I mentioned. Because of this abandonment, the “opposite errors” of dogmatism and skepticism are positions that man cannot sustain. “Instinct, reason. – We have an incapacity of proof, insurmountable by all dogmatism. We have an idea of truth, invincible to all skepticism” (fr. 395). Very real certainty and inability to prove exist side by side. But “this inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us” (fr. 282). Undoubtedly, we can see in this thesis of “natural intuition” a sort of transition from skepticism to empiricism,88 which follows from a radical criticism of rationalism, and we can compare Pascal to Hume on the 88 [TN] Del Noce uses “sentimento naturale” to translate Pascal’s “sentiment naturel.” I use “natural intuition” to follow a common English translation of fragment 434.

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basis of what has been called the “dogmatism of intuition.” This route has been proposed by Laporte and extended by Russier.89 To what extent this idea can be fruitful, I cannot tell; and I already said why this comparison seems forced and not very historical to me. But it is certain that this aspect of Pascal’s thought can be expressed as the thesis that there are only “truths of fact.” However, viewed in terms of the theory of divine freedom, did not Descartes’s philosophy also take the appearance of a proposal of radical empiricism, as the complete reduction of truths of reason to truths of fact? But since the word “empiricism” is used to mean too many things, I would rather say that the most comprehensive formula that can be used to define Pascal’s position is that of the “submission of reason” consequent upon the criticism of rationalism: “so that it is not by the proud exertions of our reason, but by the simple submissions of reason, that we can truly know ourselves” (fr. 434). This is the full realization of a theme that Descartes had already formulated in a letter to Mersenne: “because I have never written about the infinite except to submit myself to it, and not to determine what it is or is not.”90 Now I will risk a paradox: if the thesis of divine freedom and infinity is as important for Descartes as that of human freedom, we must see in Pascal the continuer and defender of the Cartesian novelty in its most rigorous sense, as well as the critic of the aspect of his thought that anticipates the Enlightenment. Indeed, every other form of philosophy of the 1600s and 1700s reconciles Descartes with some previous form of thought against which he had fought: Spinozism reconciles it with Renaissance naturalism, Malebranchian Ontologism with the traditional theory of eternal truths, the Enlightenment with the trends of libertinism and natural religion; and every one of these reconciliations 89 See her communication “L’experience du Mémorial et la conception pascalienne de la connaissance,” in Blaise Pascal: L’homme et l’œuvre, Cahiers de Royaumont 1 (Paris: Minuit, 1956), 225–58. The result one reaches in this direction is that, according to both Pascal and Hume, the constancy of the laws of nature does not manifest the existence of necessary connections: the universe of Pascal and that of Hume are universes of radical contingency. This can help dispel the notion of a similarity between Pascal and Kant. But it is still a point of contact between parts of “wholes” that are completely different. 90 Letter to Mersenne of 28 January 1641. On the theme of the “submission of reason,” the beautiful exposition by J. Chevalier, Pascal (Paris: Plon, 1922), 291ff, remains as important as ever.

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has been made possible by rejecting one element of Cartesian thought that is new with respect to tradition – the whole philosophy of freedom in Spinozism, the theory of divine freedom in Malebranche, and metaphysics as a whole in the Enlightenment. But, again, since this thesis is very far removed from mainstream opinion, let me spend a few words to clarify it. It should be evident that I do not mean at all to diminish Pascal’s originality, and even less to depict him as a mere disciple of Descartes. I mean the following: there is in him an absolutely new and original idea, the definition of atheism that I have already emphasized so much; it is properly his and does not depend either on Port-Royalism (even if it does not contradict it) or on Cartesianism. By saying this we do justice to the impression that in his thought there is more than Jansenism. But he rethought that idea in relation to Port-Royalist doctrine and, thus, to the reduction of the theological discussion in terms of the opposition of Jansenism and Molinism. Therefore, it takes the meaning that there is a correlation between the criticism of all forms of speculative metaphysics and that of the idea of the state of pure nature; and, in this sense, the idea that in his thought we should recognize the extreme expression of Port-Royalism becomes absolutely correct. But the most peculiar fact is that this extreme expression coincides with the most radical extension of the Cartesian new moment and, at the same time, with the dissociation of Cartesianism from the Molinist substructure. Thus, at the basis of Pascal’s apologetics there is not only a certain theology but also a real philosophy – the one I described. Since this kinship evidently cannot be explained in terms of an explicit will to develop the thought of Descartes, we must resort to the idea of a common significant structure. After having set Pascal in opposition to Descartes, Goldmann compares him to Kant, instead; and it is a comparison that, in the past, had already tempted many people:91 “setting reason aside to make room 91 Already in 1865 there was a book by E. Saisset, Le scepticisme  – Aenésidème, Pascal, Kant (Paris: Didier, 1865) whose title says it all. In the atmosphere of spiritualistic Kantianism and positivism, two positions that are often hard to distinguish, the comparison was certainly lived: consider the way in which Kant and Pascal were united as an object of admiration by Boutroux (and here in Italy Tarozzi considered Boutroux’s Pascal one of the most beautiful books he had ever read). We must also recall Duhem, mentioned by Chevalier in Pascal, 6n1, who judged Kant’s work to be a long, confused, and pedantic comment on Pascal’s thought. Chevalier himself devotes to their relationship, which he sees as an opposition, important remarks

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for faith,” simultaneous criticism of dogmatism and skepticism, criticism of metaphysics as a science, and so on. But whoever will write a possible and desirable book on Pascal and Kant, which is still missing, will only be able to do so in the form of a parallel between symmetric but irreducible positions. If we so desire, we can apply the concept of “criticism” to both of them; but criticism leads the former to a supernatural religion and the latter to a rational religion. In between Pascal and Kant there is Rousseau and the huge influence he exercised on Kant, and this is no small thing.92 Kant’s religious form is precisely the postulatory theism that has been swept away by recent postulatory atheism, whereas it is very doubtful that the latter has weapons against Pascalian theism. Nor, finally, is what Goldmann says about the symmetry between Montaign-Descartes-Pascal and Wolf-Hume-Kant entirely correct. Allegedly, both Pascal and Kant were preceded by a dogmatic rationalist and a skeptic, with respect to whom they stand. This would justify (to paraphrase the title of a well-known book by Brunschvicg) two studies, one on Pascal, reader of Montaigne and Descartes, and the other on Kant, reader of Wolf and Hume.93 The true symmetry is, instead, (see 197–7, 206–7, 291–2, etc.). But certainly the author who must have been most aware of it, by virtue of his formation, was Delbos, who is mentioned by Goldmann (Hidden God, 223n3), because Pascal, Biran, and Kant were his authors. The very sentence that Goldmann quotes based on a recollection by A. Adam in Histoire de la litterature française au XVII siècle, v. 2 (Paris: Domat, 1954), 294–5, “One day in a moment of discouragement, Victor Delbos, the author of La philosophie morale de Kant, remarked that he had found nothing in the German philosopher that was not already in Pascal,” shows that he inclined towards a spiritualistic type of comparison that could not lead to rigorous results. Just as his comparison between “Maine de Biran et Pascal,” in Figures et doctrines de philosophes (Paris: Plon, 1918), did not lead to rigorous results. 92 Adam himself, who also intends to compare Pascal and Kant, can only do it through the Pelagian Rousseau: “Pascal, finally, does not believe in the primacy of intelligence. What was left for him to do if not replacing it with the primacy of ethics, i.e. the fundamental thesis shared by Rousseau and Kant?” (Histoire de la litterature française, t. 2, 295). 93 Goldmann, Hidden God, 23. It is nonetheless true that the topic he mentions is, in fact, extraordinarily important – so much so that it is today, among the possible works in the history of philosophy, one of the most urgent. It would clarify the existence of two different forms of criticism (or, if you want to say so, with the incomplete precision of shortened formulas, of two different form of reconquest of metaphysics, and of religion, after the abandonment of “fundamental ontology”), which, however are irreducible, and of which the second does not surpass the first. It is interesting to

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between Suarez-Montaigne-Descartes (and Pascal) and Wolf-Hume-Kant (while it is true that, in Kant, according to the terms of the parallel, there is somehow a union of Descartes and Pascal). At most we can say that Kant meets again Pascal’s question but, and this is an extremely important point, having already taken as accomplished the victory of rational religion over revealed religion.

9. FROM PASCAL TO MALEBRANCHE It is also true, and it is what can give a certain semblance of truth to Goldmann’s theses, that Pascal’s position is a radical anti-humanism. Without a doubt, within the whole tradition of Christian thought Pascal takes his place as the thinker who emphasized the discontinuity of orders, and Gouhier has correctly remarked that the terms “continuity” and “discontinuity” are the most effective in order to define the opposition of Christian humanism and anti-humanism.94 Besides, who can fail to see that his critique of metaphysics constitutes the most consistent and most radical extremization of the anti-Molinism of Port-Royal, and what else is Molina’s doctrine if not the effort to give a systematic structure

observe that the same parallel, regarding Descartes and Kant, had been drawn by me in “Problemi del periodizzamento storico: Gli inizi della filosofia moderna,” in La filosofia della storia della filosofia, Archivio di Filosofia (1954): 187–210, on page 193. I bring it up as another proof that Goldmann and I came across the same thoughts and thus staked opposite positions on a common ground. This is why a discussion with him seemed fruitful, and I thought of organizing the present essay around a discussion of his book. 94 In his brief but very dense communication “L’anti-humanisme de Pascal,” in Anais do Congresso Internacional de filosofia de São Paulo (August 9-15, 1954) (São Paulo: Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia, 1956), 389–95. I think that the expression “antihumanism,” the most radical that ever appeared, is more appropriate to describing Pascal’s position than Jansenism – which is so generic and has too often been politicized – and Port-Royalism itself. Not because I do not think that his position was the ultimate extremization of Port-Royalism, as it actually was, but because I do not want to generate the imprecise idea that the Pensées are fragments of an application to apologetics of the general Port-Royalist doctrine. He did not start from Port-Royalism, but he encountered it. Pascal’s anti-humanism, and the peculiar kinship with libertine themes that arises because of it, was also discussed in G. Toffanin’s Italia e Francia (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960).

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to a humanist theology?95 Gouhier writes correctly that “Pascal’s antihumanism seems so perfect that it illuminates, by negating it, the essential element of Christian humanism.” He thus seems to suggest that it would be useful to conduct a comparative study, in the form of a parallel between Pascal and the author who, within Christian thought, seems to be his essential antithesis – Vico. On the one side, the man who thought that “there is, for the Christian, but one history, that which has been made ‘sacred’ by the waiting for, the coming and the permanent agony of Jesus Christ,”96 and who searched this sacred history for the proofs of Revelation, as the only proofs of religion. On the other side, the man who looked for God’s signs in profane history, intentionally setting aside the history of the chosen people. In Pascal the critique of atheism and the critique of humanism are, de facto, linked. The problem of the conversion of the atheist led him to the idea of a purification of Christian thought, in which it dissociates itself from humanist contaminations. But can we say that the two critiques are also linked de jure? And does the fact that he thought his new thesis as the extreme radicalization of Port-Royalism imply that the two are really inseparable? In fact, can we ask whether precisely because

95 It must be observed that, historically, the assessment of Molinism has been linked with that of humanism. Undoubtedly, it appears to be a position of compromise when humanism is given a secular meaning (which was common until 1930 and was never abandoned by Croce). Otherwise, it will have to be discussed in the context of a changed historical concept of humanism. 96 The importance of the relationship between Pascal and Vico was well perceived and defined by the most Vichian of contemporary philosophers, Giuseppe Capograssi: “With that profound philosophy of his which had extracted from Christianity all the bitter pessimism it contains, Pascal, as is not well known, professed his own theory of force  – addressing the question of authority and social order  – which has remained, and could not but remain, isolated … Evil and passion overwhelm human wills so much that their only certainty is force, since they have completely stepped out of themselves. As usual, Pascal went deep in his observation of another of the miseries of life, but his mistake was that he did not see the rational substance of authority, which can remain certainty only inasmuch as it is truth. However, if the truth is denied, that same certainty will turn into exterior certainty, that is, no longer certainty but true violence and typical abuse of power. Carried away by his ardent and exclusive act of faith, in his excess of faith, and in the ardor of giving an unshakable foundation to his apologetics, Pascal forgot what has been Vico’s core thought, the only idea on which it is possible to found any apologetics of history and life: that the certain is part of the true” (Opere, vol. 1 [Milan: Giuffrè, 1959], 230–1).

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of this association Pascal envisioned the unbeliever in the skeptical and pessimistic position of the libertine (in the position of mere negative atheism) without foreseeing a future positive atheism that would claim to speak in the name of the direction of history? And is the limited fortune that the Pensées enjoyed in the 1700s not also explained by the fact that Pascal, due to his anti-humanism, did not foresee the transition from libertinism to the Enlightenment? Furthermore, does not Pascal’s own thesis of the harmonization of opposite truths seem to authorize this surpassing of the critique of humanism – while still regarding as legitimate, of course, the protest against a form of Christianity at risk of being absorbed by it? Because in the history of Christian thought these two tendencies have always coexisted; now, does not Pascal’s thought take a stance of simple negation vis-à-vis humanism? Nor can one deny that this anti-humanism is also the aspect of his thought that is not relevant today.97 For example, who would incline, today, to appropriate his political thought? Yet it is tied so organically to his general outlook that it cannot in the least be cut off from it or watered down. His anti-humanism is one with his Jansenism: this is quite certain. However, to talk about his Jansenism as an “influence” is not exact, for the simple reason that Pascal was not the kind of man who is passively influenced. If he turned towards Jansenism it was because his religious thought was already inclined in an anti-humanist direction. Without contradicting at all the obvious idea of the unity of anti-humanism and Jansenism, let us go back to the question I touched upon earlier of the anti-humanist character of religious Cartesianism. We cannot give a religious interpretation of any Cartesian philosophical thesis except by giving it an anti-humanist meaning, and the reciprocal is also true. Certainly Descartes had a humanist side, even after abandoning literary and erudite humanism, the humanism of the Jesuits, that of Montaigne, and that of the libertines. But then humanism means 97 See, for example, what has been written by a true lover of Pascal’s thought, M.F. Sciacca: “Pascal lacked creatural sense … The Pascalian God, who saves and damns, often leaves us in anguish in front of a silent universe” (Pascal [Milan: Marzorati, 1962], 218–19). Read also all of his important “Conclusion.” Similarly, and with greater emphasis on the historical-political side (which is partly questionable because of the particular perspective in which the author inserts this reservation), Béguin has pointed out the absence in Pascal of any sense of “the commitment of every human person to the common work of the generations, and to the endeavors of the centuries that will follow,” Pascal par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 108.

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the ideal of the “maîtrise de la nature”; the idea of man who makes himself master and owner of nature, using the technical tools made possible by the new science, even if it is guaranteed by God (but God as “guarantor” rather than God as “end”); who makes himself master and owner of his body using medicine; who becomes master of his own behaviour through morals and knowledge of the passions. The religious aspect is that of losing the world in meditation. But upon returning to the world, after it has been founded through the process of the Meditations, civilization appears to Descartes as destined to realize not the truths of faith but, rather, the truths of science acquired through natural reason, breaking entirely with the medieval attempt to incarnate the City of God. In other words, the dissociation of spirituality and history in which I tried to identify the significant structure of Cartesianism leads to a break between humanism and anti-humanism. Humanism continues in the sense of Pelagianism or pre-Enlightenment that I mentioned earlier, and agonism against sin is replaced by agonism against nature. Conversely, religious thought takes an anti-humanistic and ascetic sense. Now, is it possible to surpass Pascal’s negativism while incorporating its novelty – namely, the realization that deism (metaphysical rationalism) and atheism are correlated? This attempt to reaffirm humanism after the Pascalian critique defines, in my judgment, the history of modern Christian Ontologism. To clarify this point, let us return to the question of the proofs of God’s existence and the negation of their possibility in Pascal.98 The

98 I know well that the question of whether Pascal admits the possibility of rational proofs of the existence of God is in dispute. I do not want to address the question directly, but clearly, given the vision I have proposed, I must regard as decisive the arguments to the contrary by Laporte (Le coeur et la raison, 33–7, 47–9) and Russier (La foi, 71ff). Does this justify speaking of skepticism or fideism in Pascal? Not in the slightest. According to Pascal there are “certain” proofs of religion (we can say that what he wants to prove is not the “philosophical God” but the “religious God” after having denied that proving the former can be a preamble to proving the latter), and if we use the word “rationalism” as a simple counterpart to the words “skepticism” and “fideism,” very few Christian thinkers, or none at all, have been as rationalist as he was. Except, they are historical proofs; hence, the exceptional importance that Pascal attributed, and that historians of him should attribute, to what normally is considered to be the second part of his apologetics, which instead is so often neglected. But the direction of attention towards these proofs is completely different from that

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thesis of the discontinuity of orders – think of its wondrous formulation in the famous fragment 792: “The infinite distance between body and mind is a symbol of the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity; for charity is supernatural” – certainly rules out that the existence of God can be proved starting from any datum, be it real or ideal, of the created world. From the sphere of the profane, one will never be able to pass to that of the sacred, by reason of the infinite distance. The author of nature, the guarantor of science, the ideal of absolute knowledge (if their existence was ever demonstrated) have no relation with the religious God. The ontological argument, in the form it takes in Descartes, in as much as it claims to proceed from the idea of God to God, is also ruled out. But in tradition there is also – and it reaffirmed itself after Pascal, from Malebranche to Rosmini – a religious school that derives from St Augustine and is usually called Ontologism (an imprecise term because of the misunderstandings it can generate). It insists on the soul’s immediate and lived contact with God, a direct experience against whose background the proofs of God take on meaning and value. Pascal’s critique does not apply to it, nor, on the other hand, can his thought move towards it, because of the link we have seen with the Cartesian thesis of divine infinity. There is another and deeper reason for this surpassing: dialectic thought can rightly claim that it has made its own the consideration of the greatness and misery of man, secularizing it (i.e., suppressing all towards the truths of science (or of metaphysics itself understood as science) and requires the conversion of the heart. On this subject, Sciacca says, with a very felicitous formula (although he seems to grant that for Pascal the metaphysical proofs retain some value independently of apologetics, a point I disagree with) that, “in order for God to ex-sist as a rational conviction, it is necessary that he in-exist by the motion of the heart that seeks Him” (Pascal, 173). Anyway, among the most recent supporters of the view that Pascal attributes value to metaphysical proofs, I will recall Baudin, La philosophie de Pascal t. 1, 45-7, who uses an especially naïve formulation: “[according to Pascal] God is the author of geometrical truths and of the order of elements, but He is even more” (whereas Pascal’s thought is the exact opposite: that the true God is not the God of philosophers, plus something). I will also recall P. Eymard, who, with a rather peculiar thesis, maintains that Pascal does not fight a posteriori proofs, both the Thomist and the Augustinian, but only the ontological argument. See P. Eymard, Pascal et ses précurseurs (Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1954), 170ff. However, see the objections raised against him by Orcibal in the communication “Le fragment Infini-Rien et ses sources,” in Blaise Pascal: L’homme et l’œuvre, 164–5.

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references to an initial Fall). It does not seem possible to reconfirm Pascal after dialectic thought except in a form of philosophy that necessarily links back to the ontologist tradition, no matter how it may diverge from forms that Ontologism took historically.99 The first attempt to surpass Pascal ontologistically was made by Malebranche. In order to understand the relationship between the two thinkers we must briefly discuss the simultaneous diversity and affinity of their spiritual experiences: in a sense Malebranche starts exactly where Pascal ends. The religious renunciation of the world for the sake of the “one necessary thing,” the endpoint of Pascal’s spiritual process, is instead the starting point of Malebranche’s; and yet he becomes a philosopher because he sees the need to become conscious of the rationality of the obsequium as intrinsic to the attitude of faith. This is because he encounters in a lived experience the theme of the fides quaerens intellectum.100 It is the theory and the experience of

 99 Brice Parain has been able to write an interesting essay on Pascal as the initiator of dialectics in modern times (Sur la dialectique [Paris: Gallimard, 1953], 13–40). Besides, Goldmann constantly insists on the yes and no co-present in the tragic vision and surpassed precisely in dialectic thought. Here I should also recall, somehow verifying his thesis in history, the thought of an eminent philosopher, Pantaleo Carabellese, according to whom Ontologism is the only position that makes it possible to surpass and criticize antithetical dialecticism. Even though, of course, Carabellese’s position, which pushes to the extreme the unity of Ontologism and Idealism, is rather different from the one to which I incline. 100 Pascal’s difference from Malebranche, and from both the Augustinian and the Thomist traditions, regarding the relations between reason and faith has been defined very well by Russier (La foi, 425–7): “whereas St. Augustine, for example, seems to regard as normal the transition from faith to intelligence, and thus from obscurity to clarity, Pascal gives a strong impression of thinking that down here it is by the opposite dynamics that we attain the most we can possess; ‘even mathematical propositions become intuitions’ (fr. 95); the ‘coutume’ which enables the spirit to ‘dye itself’ with a belief (fr. 252) gives the knowledge coming from the esprit de géométrie the same promptness and sureness as the knowledge produced by the esprit de finesse” (427). Regarding the relations between reason and faith in Malebranche and the way in which he encounters philosophy and Cartesianism, I take the liberty to refer the reader to two early writings of mine, “Nota sull’anticartesianismo di Malebranche,” in Rivista di Filosopfia neoscolastica 26, no. 1 (1934): 53–73; and “La veracità divina e i rapporti di ragione e fede nella filosofia di Malebranche,” in Malebranche nel terzo centenario della nascita (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1938), 143–78, which do not seem in the least outdated to me but are actually confirmed by the later critical literature since today, unlike then, we recognize the importance of the question, which is so existential, of the relations between reason and faith in Cartesianism.

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faith – and nothing else – that establishes an essential difference between the positions of Pascal and Malebranche. In this regard we must abandon some common images. There is no Malebranche who starts from Cartesianism, and no anti-Cartesian Pascal who spoils the relative harmony that had become established between Cartesianism and PortRoyalism. Instead, there is the Malebranche who, having started from the quest for the “one necessary thing,” encounters – somewhat in the medieval fashion, if you wish – the question of the relations between faith and reason and of reassessing reason, and, within this question, the thought of Descartes; and there is the Pascal, initially a Christian scientist, and thus initially Cartesian, at least regarding the relations of reason and faith, who encounters Port-Royalism. Now it would be extremely intriguing, and important, to study the transposition of Pascalian themes that takes place in the thought of Malebranche, starting from this initial difference. I would not mind proposing this formula: in Malebranche, Pascal’s anti-philosophy, his ­critique of philosophy, becomes philosophy. The historical question of the relations between Pascal and Malebranche is the first chapter of a possible book devoted to the relations between theological existentialism and Ontologism. It is an investigation that nobody has ever attempted: the literature on the relations between Pascal and Malebranche, even if one searches for mere hints, is minuscule, and the best one can find is Brunschvicg’s parallel based on simple opposition. I will limit myself to some brief, elementary comments, aimed at underscoring the kinship rather than the opposition. Consider, for example, the role that the theme Infini-rien plays in Malebranche’s system. Pascal had written: “The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing.” For Malebranche, “there is no relation between the infinite and the finite.”101 It follows that, just as for Pascal, there can be no ascending continuity from anything created to God; and that no creature can be the motive of the divine creative action, and so the end of creation must be found in the Incarnation. Therefore Christianity is the only religion capable of establishing a relation between the infinite and the finite; the only religion that pays God the honour worthy of him: “compared to God, the universe is nothing, and must be counted as nothing; but there are only the 101 See, for example, Entretiens sur la Métaphysique, XIV, 8. But this theme is repeated in countless other passages and is the true directing principle of his entire philosophy

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Christians, those who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, who truly count their own being, and this vast universe which we admire, as nothing. Possibly philosophers lead to this judgment. But they do not pronounce it. They dare to approach God, as if they did not know that the distance between Him and us is infinite. They imagine that God is pleased by the profane worship they give Him. They have the insolence or, if you wish, the presumption of adoring Him. Let them be quiet.”102 Do we not find here, transposed, Pascal’s criticism of deism? The transposition consists in making the centre of religious thought not so much the Redemption as the Incarnation. Thus, I believe one could present Malebranche’s thought as a transposition of Pascal’s apologetics into Berullian theocentrism (in the sense used by Bremond).103 It must also be observed that Malebranche’s connection between philosophicaltheological and historical proofs of Christianity is strictly similar to that established by Pascal between historical and psychological proofs. It is a common opinion that, apart from the strictly logical difficulties of his Ontologism,104 this attempt by Malebranche to sublate Pascal’s philosophy realizing the unity of the philosophical God and the religious God ended in complete failure from the religious standpoint – that is, in the greatest separation between a philosophical God and a religious God that ever appeared in the history of Christian thought. The attempt to restore the classical, Augustinian and Thomist, theory of eternal truths takes the form, when it is rethought in Cartesian terms, of the separation between divine wisdom and power. So that, despite appearances, Malebranche’s God is much farther away from the Christian theological tradition than Descartes’s God. Divine will becomes captive to an “order” of an intelligible world that is effectively thought as a norm to which all spirits and God himself as will must subordinate themselves. The endpoint is a God who is more reason than existence since his aspect of existence (or, in Malebranche’s terms, of “power”) merely makes up for reason’s intrinsic lack of dynamism. From this new 102 Ibid. 103 About the definition of theocentrism, see H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (Paris: Bloud, 1929), 23ff. From Bremond’s perspective Pascal represents the extreme type of an anthropocentric religiosity. 104 Regarding this difficulty, see the extremely precise remarks by Gueroult, Descartes, vol. 1, 287ff., which are especially interesting in as much as they differ from the standard objections. He also insists on the extreme complexity and greatness (which make him one of the major philosophers of all time) of this thinker who too often goes unrecognized (see in vol. 3 his “General conclusions,” 359ff).

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relation between God and eternal truths follows a new relation between God and man. “God glorifies Himself by creating out of love” had been until then the common motif of all Christian schools; for Malebranche this motif is replaced by another, “God creates the world to glorify Him.”105 The reason for this is that in God every love other than selflove would be déreglé since divine love must conform to order, his will’s unbreakable law. Moreover, “Reason” means universality and necessity. Therefore God has to act according to “general practical acts of will.” An act of love addressed at a single individual in his singularity would be in God a “pathological act of will” (to use Kantian terminology, which is not out of place because there is a strange analogy between Malebranche’s theology and Kant’s practical philosophy). This common description is certainly oversimplified and does not take into account the countless nuances that make a precise reconstruction of Malebranche’s thought so hard. But overall, it comes close to the truth and raises the question of whether ultimately there is a contradiction between Cartesianism and Ontologism in as much as the latter is necessarily a philosophy of divine presence of the Christian humanist kind. Within the significant structure of Cartesianism, Ontologism becomes theological rationalism.106 The contradictory co-presence in 105 On the egocentrism of the Malebranchian God, on the novelty of this thesis with respect to tradition, and on its consequences regarding the idea of divine goodness (and thus of creation and glory), see the very important remarks by Fr Y. De Montcheuil, Malebranche et le quietisme (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 143ff. One should also consider the comments by a philosopher, Scheler, who was very interested in the question of Ontologism and in the philosophy of Malebranche (with which I have the impression he often compared his thought, parting ways with it sometimes to reform it [with respect to the vision in God], other times to criticize it [with respect precisely to the idea of the glory of God]). 106 By “theological rationalism” I mean the position in which God is a “prisoner” of the ideal order. This position reaches its extreme expression in Hegel, merging in him with what I called earlier “metaphysical rationalism,” which constitutes a distinct essence. Metaphysical rationalism and theological rationalism can merge precisely only through the elimination of Ontologism. About God as “prisoner” in Hegel, see the important remarks by K. Barth “on the annihilation of God’s sovereignty which makes the qualification as ‘God’ very problematic when it is applied to what Hegel calls spirit, idea, reason etcetera. This God, Hegel’s God … is His own prisoner” (see “Hegel” in Cahiers théologiques [Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux, 1955], 51). See also the paradoxical statements – which, however, are always stimulating – by Shestov: thinking of Leibniz and Hegel, he sees no alternative between the “prisoner” God and theological arbitrarism. In fact, we know that Shestov was personally acquainted with Barth, and his thought is still highly regarded in Barthian circles.

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Malebranche of the opposite motifs of Ontologism and anti-humanism makes him a truly representative thinker of the 1670 to 1715 crisis between the Baroque and the Enlightenment. At this point it may seem that Goldmann’s vision regains strength, despite the criticisms I have tried to make: in the philosophy of the 1600s we have, on the one side, the philosophical God of rationalism, on the other side, the anti-humanistic Christianity of the hidden God, and this independently of what may have been the subjective intentions of the various thinkers. It may seem that in the 1600s the Augustinianism of the presence of God was definitively defeated; that the fundamental categories that Goldmann took as his starting point to explain the process of modern philosophy – rationalism, tragic vision, dialectic thought – have been substantially confirmed, albeit with the historical corrections I have proposed. However, consider this: does not the general characterization of Cartesianism I have tried to provide – or, better, of the framework wherein all operations of Cartesian thought take place, as the maximal accentuation of the theme of freedom on the one hand, and of ahistoricity on the other – make us understand the truth of Vico’s critique of the “monastic” and not “political” character of Cartesian philosophy? In opposition to Leibniz’s view of philosophy in the 1600s, which has provided the model for the usual history of philosophy?107

107 Here I am mentioning a crucially important problem that has not yet been worked out, or at least needs to be worked out again completely and, obviously, cannot be worked out in a footnote. The essential points are: (1) Leibniz already takes for granted the victory of Spinozism within the horizon of Cartesian philosophy. This happens because he shares completely in the panlogistic intention of Spinoza’s thought; and his position can be presented as an effort to reconcile Spinozism with reality (with the truths of common humanity, with history), and his Christianity itself, rather than a presupposition, is a Christianity rediscovered in this work of reconciling Spinozism with reality. To Leibniz panlogism is a philosophy of justification and universal reconciliation; on the contrary, in the form it takes in Spinoza, it becomes the meeting point of all heresies. Hence Leibniz’s “eclecticism” and “diplomacy” (terms that are used often but must be defined in their very special meaning); hence the need to rediscover, deepening them, the themes of that true masterpiece, Leibniz et l’organisation religieuse de la terre by J. Baruzi (Paris: Alcan, 1907), recognizing this ideal as the central point starting from which all Leibnizian themes can be understood. His political and religious action is internal to his philosophy. (2) So that, even though in some respect we can say that his greatest foe is Spinoza, in another respect we can say it is Cartesianism because, for Leibniz, the reason for Spinoza’s defeat lies in the fact that his system was built using Cartesian materials. (3) Leibniz’s radical incomprehension of Cartesianism

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Here several questions arise: How much can Vico’s judgments about the history of philosophy, which are normally regarded as mere examples manifests itself first of all in the reduction of doubt to a mere rhetorical procedure; as a consequence the aspect of Cartesianism that makes it essentially a philosophy of freedom is set aside and not recognized. (4) What has been most negatively affected by Leibniz’s perspective on this matter has been his assessment of Malebranche and Occasionalism, and this to the extent that Malebranche intended to pursue the same ideal of religious restoration as Leibniz but within Cartesianism (this shared ideal was the reason for the longest philosophical friendship in history, lasting forty years, in which, however, the two philosophers did not understand each other). The study of the relations between Malebranche and Leibniz – in which, however, we must recognize the complete sincerity of the latter, even in his misunderstanding – must be completely refreshed. Today the task is greatly facilitated by the magnificent book by A. Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1955), a work of high philology in which are gathered all the relevant texts of the two authors and of their exchanges. We can say that due to the incorrect assessment of Occasionalism Geulincx (never quoted by Leibniz) became a philosopher that interests only the Dutch and the Flemish, Malebranche almost only the French, and Vico almost only the Italians. (5) In the important but questionable book by Y. Belaval, Leibniz critique de Descartes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), we find a curious remark (126–9): Descartes, the despiser of history, was the promoter of the history of philosophy, whereas Leibniz, the historian, heralds the philosophy of history (the second thesis is not new; and we must recall the important intuitions on this matter by F. Olgiati, Il significato storico di Leibniz [Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1929]). Now, this thesis can be given a correct meaning – namely, that the “Cartesian beginning of modern philosophy” cannot be eliminated, as I said earlier (nor do I think that Belaval understands it otherwise, regarding Descartes). But we must observe that, in Leibniz, we find the first kernel of the standard secular vision of the history of modern philosophy and that Hegel’s vision of the 1600s follows exactly that of Leibniz, secularizing it. Or, better, we must observe that, in Leibniz’s consideration of the history of post-Reformation thought, two elements coexist: the first, completely forgotten, is the rediscovery of the theologians of the Catholic Reformation and, thus, of the Catholic Reformation itself (whereas, strangely, an isolated and tendentious consideration of Pascal’s Provinciales has been fundamentally important in the formation of the negative concept of Counter-Reformation); the second is a judgment about the philosophy of the 1600s that, in the various aspects in which it can be developed, has become the criterion that all histories of philosophy have taken as a model, at least until its demolition after 1930, whose importance has hardly been perceived anyway (hence the exceptional importance I have attributed to Laporte’s historical work). This is why a study of the role played by Leibniz’s thought in the formation of the history of philosophy and its usual periodization schemes would be ­extremely important. (6) We must also observe that secular interpretations of Vico depend on having inserted his thought into a historical framework already determined by Leibniz’s scheme, within the variety of extensions and corrections to which it is amenable (e.g., that Leibniz’s devaluation of Occasionalism is decisive for those interpretations). (7) And that the new interpretation of Cartesianism leads us to

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of “poetic characters,” be used to determine his philosophical position and be a guide in choosing among the many interpretations of his thought that have been given? Second, can Vico’s thought be interpreted as the continuation of Descartes’s critique of atheism after having criticized the concession (in opposition) to the libertines, which is the distinctive feature of Cartesian ahistoricity and the reason the crisis of the Cartesian dike against irreligion manifests itself in Bayle’s thought – a continuation that is also the continuation of Malebranche’s Occasionalism and Ontologism, so that we can speak of a certain symmetry between the relationship Vico-Malebranche and the relationship Pascal-Descartes?

10. FROM MALEBRANCHE TO VICO I am aware, of course, of the perplexities this parallel may arouse, which have been responsible for the negative reception of a book108 – which in fact was very remarkable, although not exactly a model of philological precision – arguing the thesis that Vico was a Malebranchian. Who, apparently, could be farther away than Vico from Malebranche? On one side, the last of the humanists, on the other, the last of the medievals; on one side, the discoverer of fantasy, on the other, the enemy of imagination and the most rigorous theoretician of the ascesis of pure intellect; on one side, the man who conceived knowledge as vision, in a form that may appear to be purely passivist, on the other, the man who advanced an activist doctrine of knowledge; on one side, the philosopher

recognize, instead, the truth of the very different vision that Vico had of the philosophy of the 1600s, even though it was formulated in historical judgments, expressed, so to speak, in mythical form; or rather, in ingenious judgments, if we want to refer to Vico’s doctrine of ingegno. (8) And that the question of the relations between Vico and Leibniz must be set up in this context, and it must lead, I believe, to the thesis that we must look to the latter and not to the former for the initial germ that subsequently led to historicism (this assertion, however, must be formulated in very different terms than those used, for example, by Meinecke). 108 L. Giusso, La filosofia di G.B. Vico e l’età barocca (Roma: Perrella, 1943). This thesis is not new, anyway, because the comparison had already been made by Gioberti in such terms that he made rethinking and perfecting it the program of his own philosophy; more recently, Carabellese, to whom Giusso’s book is dedicated, had insisted, albeit without referring to Malebranche, on the necessity of an ontologistic interpretation in L’Idealismo italiano (Naples: Loffredo, 1938).

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of history, on the other, the thinker who reduced our rigorous knowledge to that of the essence of bodies, the greatest enemy of erudition in the 1600s; on one side, the philosopher who most had a sense of vitality, on the other, the least “vitalist” philosopher who ever lived. Still, sometimes history presents us with the most peculiar paradoxes, and although here I cannot fully justify the thesis that Vico was the only rigorous continuer of Malebranche, I will try nonetheless to highlight some facts that seem essential to me for a precise reconstruction of Vico’s thought. I will do so based on a premise that I believe is easy to accept: the interpretation of Vico is tightly linked with that of the philosophy of Descartes, which is in a sense, but only in a sense, its antithesis; and therefore the renewal of the concepts of Cartesianism, Ontologism, and Occasionalism cannot but have an impact on it.109 Because it is obvious that, if one interprets Descartes’s philosophy as pure “mathematicism” or as the “beginning of subjectivism,” Ontologism as the caput mortuum of dogmatism and Occasionalism as a mere miracle-based solution, the question is already settled. Vico will be the initiator of “historicism,” as deeper subjectivism,110 and the critic ante litteram of the philosophy of history; or, if one does not want to use this terminology 109 In Giambattista Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 6–7, Corsano does a good job of recognizing this, affirming that, for a more precise interpretation of Vico’s thought, it is necessary to take into account investigations like those by Laporte, Gouhier, Pintard, and Lenoble, which are precisely those essential for such revision. But then, strangely, he writes that, regarding Descartes’s religious thought, Gouhier and Laporte “face the objections of men like Gilson, Blondel and Jaspers, just to name the most important” (88). Now, Gilson’s La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie is certainly an extremely important work because it highlights, so forcefully and for the first time, the theological horizon into which the formation and development of Cartesianism must be inserted; but it is entirely outdated as far as its interpretation of Descartes’s philosophy is concerned, an interpretation that has been practically abandoned by the author himself. See, indeed, his subsequent Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du systeme cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930), and the correct remark (from his perspective) by Maxime Leroy, who said, I do not remember where, that the pupil (Gouhier) perverted the teacher. As for Blondel, in his final years he went as far as completely reversing the interpretation he had advanced in 1896. And, as for Jaspers, his book is certainly of very great interest because it manifests the reactions of a great philosopher reading Descartes, but it cannot be said to be a work of history. 110 I am referring to Croce’s sentence: “It is true that with the new form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes,” in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R.G. Colingwood (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 26.

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too closely tied to a specific philosophy, he will be essentially a methodologist of history, the first who fixed the canons of history as reliable science; his invocations of metaphysica philosophorum will be hat tips to a venerable tradition; and Occasionalism will be a mere instrument to avoid materialist and sensualist positions. Things will go differently if one recognizes that Ontologism and Occasionalism are serious philosophical positions, and that Malebranche was the first thinker who united them rigorously.111 In this case, it becomes quite easy to gather the texts that show Vico as an adherent of Ontologism and Occasionalism in the properly Malebranchian form. We only have to browse the initial pages of De uno: “Summa autem sapientia est ordo rerum aeternus, quo Deus per simplicissimas vias cuncta regit. Quae viae, quia ab omnipotentia patefiunt, facilissimae sunt; et, quia ad Deum summum bonum ducunt, sunt omnes optimae”

We know that Croce refused to even consider, dismissing them as second-hand formulae, any ontologistic and Occasionalistic aspects of Vico’s thought, whose presence he must well have recognized, at least in the juridical treaties and above all in the first book of the De uno (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 95–6). We can say in his justification that, at the time he was writing his book, 1911, everybody agreed  – Hegelians and Kantians, positivists and neo-Thomists – in regarding Ontologism and Occasionalism as examples of uncritical philosophical thought, but today … This amputation is what makes his work so peculiar. Because his case actually cannot be described as one of those, once fashionable, idealistic sublations in which an author was considered … only under the aspect that lent itself to be sublated. On the contrary, there is no doubt that Croce felt Vico to be his true “auttore”; the third “auttore” after Marx and after Hegel, but the essential “auttore.” There is no doubt that his philosophy has been a constant dialogue with Vico. Hence, a historical problem arises: How does Vico’s philosophy, amputated of its Ontologism and Occasionalism, prefigure Croce’s philosophy? How can a process that began with a critique of Marx end up in a philosophy that in a certain sense finds itself to have been prefigured by Vico? This problem, which is essential for a critical study of Croce, is also clearly of interest for the study of Vico’s thought. But it does not affect, or affects only tangentially, the question of the historical Vico. 111 In the XV Eclaircissement of the Recherche de la Vérité, Malebranche, who constantly makes every possible effort to conform every one of his theses to St Augustine, must acknowledge that this latter never posed the question of the efficacy of secondary causes and that we cannot find in his works a hint of anything that could enable us to support the new thesis with his authority. On the other hand, in the Middle Ages, Occasionalism had constantly gone hand in hand with theological arbitrarism and, thus, with the opposite of Ontologism.

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(Ch. VI). “Simplicitas educet, quod una directionis lege facit regitque cuncta.  Facilitas manifestatur, quod ipsarum sponte rerum disponit cuncta” (Cap.  VII).112 “At Dei sapientia, quatenus suo quaeque tempore cuncta promit, ‘divina providentia’ appellatur” (Ch. VIII).113 “Divinae providentiae autem viae sunt opportunitates, occasiones, casus” (Ch. IX). “Occasiones non esse causas rerum. Corpora autem et quae sunt corporis, uti sensus, esse occasiones, per quas aeternum rerum ideae in mentibus excitentur. At fluxa, uti corpora et quae sunt corporis, uti sensus, quid aeternum supra corpus gignere non posse: prae cuius veri ignoratione homines in Deum ingratos agere” (De opera proloquium [35]).114 “VI ORDINIS COGNOSCIMUS VERA RERUM  – Sed homo eas veri notiones cum ceteris hominibus communes habere non posset, nisi ideam ordinis cum iisdem haberet quoque communem” (Principium [3]).115 Also, about Adam’s sin: “Haec est natura hominis integra, 112 The theory of simple ways, in connection with the theory of Order, is specific to Malebranche, without antecedents. Just consider the reactions it provoked in Arnauld, who perceived himself to be the great defender of tradition, and in Fénelon (in his posthumous Réfutation du système du P. Malebranche sur la nature et sur la grâce, ch. 13). For its overall exposition, see Malebranche, Entretiens, IX. 113 According to Malebranche, the connection between divine wisdom and Providence is founded on the idea that “the instant of creation does not pass” (Entretien VII, 6). That is, what divine wisdom has established continues in time, through simple ways and general laws, by which Providence manifests itself. 114 It is all too clear that Malebranche and Vico think identically about making the systems of occasional causes the ways of Providence. As for the second step, by finding the root of men’s ingratitude to God in the failure to distinguish Cause and occasions, and thus in ignorance of the true Cause, Vico returns to an idea that Malebranche highlights at great length in the passage I already mentioned from De l’erreur la plus dangereuse de la philosophie des anciens. 115 This idea coincides with Malebranche’s famous thesis about “God as the locus of the spirits.” The vision of the intelligible order is the foundation of spiritual society and of communication itself because purely sensitive beings could not communicate. As for the vis ordinis or the vis veris, their activist character certainly does not contradict the “passivity” that is often attributed to Malebranche’s thought; because we must not forget that, for Malebranche, ideas have “efficacy,” and the “visual metaphor” runs the risk of making one misunderstand the meaning of his thought. Far from breaking away from Malebranche, Vico is, thus, in De Uno, one of the few who truly understood him. Unlike the De Antiquissimo, the juridical treaties attest to a very careful reading of Malebranche, even though the quotations are relatively rare. Here I depart from a common opinion, which is also accepted by an eminent philosopher who is hardly inclined to accept the standard interpretations of Vico, Capograssi; who, in his very beautiful study Dominio, libertà e tutela nel De Uno (in Opere, v. 1) writes that, “in its presuppositions, the position of De Uno is a traditional

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qua primus omnium parens, Adam, a Deo creatus est, divino auxilio ita comparata, ut nullo sensuum tumultu agitaretur, sed et in sensus et in cupiditates liberum pacatumque exerceret imperium” (Ch. XIV). “Hinc sensus, a Deo homini inditi ut vitam tuerentur, sumpti sunt arbitri iudicesque, qui vera rerum disceptent et iudicent. Atqui sunt fallacissimi: igitur ratio, quae sensuum iudicium sequitur, vera rerum ignorat” (Ch. XXV).116 “Sed homo Deum aspectu amittere omnino non potest suo, quia a Deo sunt omnia et quod a Deo non est nihil est. Nam Dei lumen in omnibus rebus, nisi reflexu, saltem radiorum refractu cernere cuique datur” (Ch. XXXIII). “Hinc aeterni veri semina in homine corrupto non prorsus extincta, quae, gratia Dei adiuta, conantur contra naturae corruptionem” (Ch. XXXIV).117

I chose these passages, and many others could be presented, especially from De uno and De constantia, because it seems unquestionable to me that they refer not to generic Augustinianism but specifically to Malebranchian Augustinianism. position” (12). On the contrary, in my judgment, and I believe I outlined at least the first but essential elements of the proof, it is typically Malebranchian. 116 The brief description of intact nature summarizes perfectly the theses of Malebranche. Since the texts that should be cited are too numerous, I refer to Gouhier, La philosophie de Malebranche, 103ff, and Gueroult, Malebranche, III, 210ff. The second passage clearly goes back to Malebranche’s theory of the biological function of sensitivity. This thesis had already been outlined by Descartes (VI Meditation), but nonetheless it was rigorously developed, and introduced into the theory of corrupted nature, only by Malebranche: “never judge through the sense what things are in themselves, but only what relations they have with our body, because [the senses] have been given us … only for the preservation of our body” (Recherche, t. 1, ch. 5, 3); the senses are “false witnesses with respect to the truth, but faithful admonishers with respect to the preservation and comfort of life” (Entretien IV, 15). 117 These passages, and especially the first, can be linked to the one by Malebranche that I cited earlier (339–40), in which Brunschvicg saw the greatest opposition between him and Pascal. We must also recall that Vico clearly had Malebranche in mind when he talked about the “metaphysica philosophorum,” which “docet homines in Deo ideas rerum omnium intelligere” (see Notae in duos libros, and so on, in vol. 3 of Il diritto universale in Nicolini’s edition [Bari: Laterza, 1936], 736). See also, in De constantia, ch. 5, where he speaks of Malebranche’s philosophy as the road “ad Platonis dogmata metaphysica recipienda” but defines at least the third of the “Platonis dogmata” in Malebranchian terms; likewise in ch. 185 of De Uno he compares Malebranche to Plato by attributing Occasionalism to the latter. In short, for Vico, Malebranche brings us back to Plato, but from the theoretical standpoint it is a very Malebranchized Plato.

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Starting from these we can easily reconstruct his thought as an extension to history of Malebranche’s philosophy against adversaries that the latter had not taken on: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bayle. It is God’s presence to the human mind that halts men “in their bestial wandering through the great forest of the earth, in order to introduce among them the order of human civil things,”118 and “without order (which is to say without God) human society cannot stand for a moment.”119 It is the vis veri that keeps acting even in the world of pagan nations and, actually, in the bestioni themselves. Undoubtedly this interpretation would impose itself if all we had left of Vico were the juridical treatises.120 Against this interpretation three objections seem possible – and decisive. The first, and fundamental, is: What value shall we give to the principle of verum factum, which is apparently irreconcilable with an ontologistic theory of participation? Indeed, in its first form it seems to mean a semi-skeptic gnoseology of humility, far removed from Ontologism;121 and in the second form it seems to mean an affirmation 118 Scienza Nuova seconda §1097 [The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T.G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 377.] 119 Ibid. §1100 [Ibid. 378–9]. 120 I do not need to spend too much time on this interpretation since the reader can find a complete exposition of it in the book by Giusso, which is based, essentially, on the juridical treatises. Its greatest limitation is that it pays almost no attention to the verum factum, with the result of essentially presenting Vico’s philosophy as a mere extension of that of Malebranche; and truly in the juridical treatises it is hard, if not impossible, to find any trace of the verum factum (see the correct remark by Corsano, Giambattista Vico, 138). Moreover, Giusso’s book is tainted by his polemical intent to give an interpretation that is the exact opposite of that of Croce, with the result of depending, in opposition, on his adversary. While I understand, because of this polemical aspect, the severe judgments by historians with an Idealist inspiration, I do not comprehend the hostility of Franco Amerio in his otherwise very fine book Introduzione allo studio di G. B. Vico (Turin: SEI, 1946), which is the true endpoint of the Catholic critique of Croce’s interpretation, which had started with Buonaiuti’s review in Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica 3 no. 6 (1911) (regarding Giusso, see 155n2, and Giornale di metafisica [1946], 157–63). Nor do I comprehend why Amerio gives so little space to Vico’s Ontologism and Occasionalism (see 153–5). Or, actually, I comprehend it all too well in light of the old grudge between Thomists and ontologists. 121 Commenting on De antiquissima, Croce writes that “for Vico God’s existence is certain, but not scientifically provable” (6–7), but the context seems to convey that he thinks it is certain as a revealed truth. On the contrary, according to Vico, this

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of the divinity, or at least of the autonomy, of man, of the historical world. The second objection, connected to the first, is: what to make of his critique of Cartesianism? The third is the presence, in De antiquissima, of a nominalist philosophy of mathematics, which is at the antipodes of that of Malebranche. To answer the first question, we need to see whether the verum factum is linked with the history of seventeenth-century Occasionalism, so that the originality of the latter lies precisely in its having made its own a principle that previously belonged to skeptical or empiricist philosophies; so that one can draw a line of development from Geulinx to Malebranche to Vico. Therefore, let us begin by saying something about the history of seventeenth-century Occasionalism, from the standpoint of what makes it totally irreducible to previous forms in which it was linked, instead, with theological arbitrarism.122 In this regard, we must break away from two standard views. First of all, from the view that originates from Leibniz, who sees in it only a miracle-like and edifying solution. Then, from the more astute view that tends to see in it the theological and the metaphysical stages of the process that leads to the empiricist certainty without proof is due to the fact that, in reference to God, we must speak of presence and not of proof, precisely in the sense of Malebranche. I am not going to comment on the best known passage about Malebranche in De Antiquissima, ch. 6 (De Mente), both because it contains, more or less, one error of interpretation per line and because I cannot bring myself to give this still immature work the importance that ontologistic interpreters, above all, attribute to it. Anyway, the meaning is clear: (1) Vico intends not to involve Malebranche in his condemnation of Descartes; (2) the passage contains an acceptance, by and large, of Ontologism and Occasionalism: “what we know in ourselves is that God is the first author of all motions both of bodies and of souls.” I think it is important to point out that Vico, who is such a peculiar reader, is ­instead exemplarily correct when he presents the doctrine of Malebranche’s “metaphysica philosophorum” in the juridical treatises. This suggests an extensive reading of Malebranche on his part, after De Antiquissima. And, above all, it suggests a possible hypothesis about the evolution of his thought. I do have the impression that in the juridical treatises he thought of his philosophy as a political and historical extension of that of Malebranche. Subsequently, and this is the perspective of the two versions of the Scienza Nuova, he realized that it was impossible to conceive of the continuity as an extension. 122 Until now, nobody has attempted to write a history of Occasionalism. I tried to sketch a possible outline of it in the entry “Occasionalism” in the Enciclopedia Filosofica (Florence: Sansoni, 1968–69).

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conception of “nomological causality.” The theological stage is that from Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers. The scientific-metaphysical stage is the replacement of the quest for causes by the quest for laws in Malebranche; supposedly, Hume’s genius was to transcribe into empiricism the themes of the critique of causes that Malebranche had already developed, thus enabling empiricism, via the consequent dissociation from naturalistic metaphysics, to reach its modern and critical form; while at the same time he separated the critical aspect of Occasionalism from the dogmatic one by making impossible, through the critique of the causal axiom, the theological transfiguration of the empiricist conception of causality, which, supposedly, is precisely what Occasionalism consists in. Let us briefly sketch, against these two views, the line of development of seventeenth-century Occasionalism. I believe that a first overall definition could be to describe it as the effort to expel from Cartesianism all the motifs amenable to be developed in the direction of the Enlightenment or towards empiricism (or even materialism) or Spinozism.123 Let us set aside the erroneous thesis that the doctrine of occasional causes is virtually present in the philosophy of Descartes as the only solution concerning the relations between the soul and the body that truly follows from his principles. Descartes professed a completely different thesis about such relations, which is perfectly consistent with the rest of his philosophy.124 He grants a real reciprocal action of the soul 123 Perhaps in Geulincx we must recognize the extremization of the anti-­ Gassendism of Descartes; in Malebranche, certainly, both the anti-Locke and the ­anti-Spinoza; in Vico, just as certainly, chiefly the anti-Bayle. Consider, in fact the (essentially correct) characterization that Pintard (Le libertinage érudit, 570) gives of Bayle’s thought: “Protestantism, Cartesianism, libertine Pyrrhonism, these three forces which until then had been enemies now united in Bayle’s thought,” giving rise to  “a  consistent and aggressive rationalism.” Now, Vico, through the critique of Cartesianism, arrives at a position, at least in his judgment, capable of fighting libertine thought, and at a work that is clearly anti-Protestant, because of the underlying relationship between nature and grace. Or we can also say: at the beginning of the Enlightenment we have the unification of three trends that until then had been enemies: iusnaturalism, libertine thought, and a certain type of Cartesianism. Through his critiques of Cartesianism and libertinism, Vico gets to trace back to Catholic thought the idea of natural law. It is undeniable that this matches the letter of his work, and I think we should look for his spirit nowhere else than in his letter. 124 See footnote 86 above.

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on the body, the two of which he regards as essentially united. Certainly, one can only “éprouver en soi même sans philosopher” (“Lettre à Elisabeth” of 28 June 1643) – that is, one can live it and not think it. It only manifests itself in the “relâche des sens” (ibid.) and, thus, in an altogether different disposition than the intellectual ascesis required for scientific and metaphysical knowledge. However, this thesis does not contradict the spirit of his philosophy, if we consider that the affirmation of a dimension “this side of reason” – of an infra-rational sphere, in short – is in a way correlative with the affirmation of the dimension “beyond reason” signified by the theory of divine freedom. Therefore, Occasionalism that presents itself as fully consistent Cartesianism must necessarily emphasize simultaneously its rationalist and idealist characters, with the idealist emphasis limiting the rationalist one and preventing the transformation into Spinozism. A deeper analysis would bring to light a deeper reason: the correlation between the transition to Occasionalism and the different ideas of philosophy in Descartes, Geulincx, and Malebranche. Indeed, Descartes had only asked philosophy to overcome a doubt; instead, Geulincx asks of it the definition of a type of existence, and Malebranche a type of thought that continues religious experience, in terms of form and meditative ascesis, because the need for rationality is intrinsic to faith. For Geulincx the philosopher is a man who operates a conversio mentis intra se ipsam, replacing false naturalistic certainty with the evidence of the cogito; where we must observe that he emphasizes the cogito rather than the sum, giving the Cartesian principle an idealist bent that is not found in any other philosopher of the 1600s. To him thought becomes the measure of being, and this leads him to eliminate all Cartesian themes tied to the assertion of the “primitive notion” of the unity of soul and body. By virtue of this idealist bent, the affirmation of the cogito coincides with the declaration that the principle impossibile est ut is faciat qui nescit quomodo fiat is an axiom – that is, with the very thesis verum factum stated in negative terms. It is an axiom because such a principle presents itself as the farthest extension of the Cartesian consciousness argument: the Cartesian critique of the unconscious faculty to produce ideas is extended to a denial of the power of the soul to cause physical motions, so that I ignore everything about my action on the body, except the fact of my own will. By denying to anybody who ignores the generative process the dignity of being a cause, the axiom determines a metaphysics of creation (dissociation of the idea of power from that of

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nature) and creatural humility. But the deepest aspect of his thought can be identified in his attempt to re-deduce Aristotelian metaphysics starting from the logical motif that supposedly conditioned it. Since the opposition of Occasionalism and Aristotelianism is envisioned as that between a theocentric and an anthropocentric metaphysics, the critique of Aristotelianism will necessarily take the form of an accusation of having transformed our intellectual operations into existing things. And from another angle, which is complementary to this opposition of the theocentric and anthropocentric points of view, it will coincide with the opposition of science, which frees our vision of reality from what has been added by our subjectivity, and rhetoric, so that the explanation of Aristotle’s categories will have to be found in the forms of language. In its original formulation language reflects the slavery of man to the prejudices of the senses as a consequence of sin. Aristotle’s gnoseology is perfectly consistent with his metaphysics, so that its fundamental axiom can be held as true, with one variation (nihil est in “corrupto” intellectu quid prius non fuerit in sensu). Aristotle’s entire philosophy is thereby reduced to an ontologization of human discourse: therefore, it must find its explanation in the philosophy of rhetoric and of language. Geulincx pushes this criticism so far that it threatens the very possibility of metaphysics in general: so that it seems that the very principle of Occasionalism, “we cannot think things except as souls and bodies,” expresses only that it is altogether impossible for us to think otherwise. The ideal of metaphysics tends to present itself as that of a knowledge of reality independent of the forms of thought. Just as rigorous physics must abstract from perceivable qualities, so a true metaphysics would require the possibility of abstracting from the form of the intellect. But whereas in the case of physics we can correct the perceivable appearances with the intellect, for metaphysics this correction is impossible. Thought and reality seem fixed in an absolute opposition: the thing being thought is not the real thing precisely because it passed through the forms of the intellect. Having posed the question in these terms, the conclusion he should be obliged to draw is immediately apparent: metaphysical knowledge is impossible and must be replaced by criticism, as determination of the limitation we cannot overcome. It is a form of criticism of a skeptical-mystical character, which inclines towards a rediscovery of the theme of docta ignorantia: the awareness that things are not in themselves as they are thought by us and that only God as their creator can have an adequate science of them. In

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some way it is a prefiguration, albeit in critical-skeptical form, of Kantism, so that people have been able to talk quite correctly about a DescartesGeulincx-Kant line of development.125 Likewise it was also said, somewhat emphatically, but fundamentally correctly, that his ethics is the link connecting the teaching of Socrates with Kant’s foundation of the metaphysics of morals.126 I thought I ought to belabour this point a bit (even though at the same time I have been too brief, running the risk, because of brevity, of some imprecision, given the complexity of Guelincx’s thought) for several reasons: because the continuity of the development of the verum factum in Occasionalism is an unfamiliar topic; because against this background we understand the originality of Malebranche, which lies in the ontologistic surpassing of Guelincx’s skeptical motif; 127 because, in the same way in which Guelincx is the prelude to classical German thought, Malebranche is instead the intermediary between Cartesianism and Italian thought from Vico to Rosmini; because, within Cartesian philosophy in a broad sense, the point of contact with Kant must be sought in Geulincx and not in Pascal; and, finally, because the enormous importance attributed to the theme of fallen man is a

125 As was done by the renovator of Geulincxian studies, H.J. de Vleeschauwer. We are waiting for the publication of his great work on Geulincx, which has already been written. Among his numerous partial writings I will only recall: Three Centuries of Geulicx Research (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1957), in which he clarifies the process whereby the history of Geulincxian criticism leads to the question of Geulincx as a precursor of Kantian transcendentalism; and the very unusual article “De Benedetto Croce a Arnold Geulincx o el Criterium ‘verum est factum,’” in Revista de filosofia (1955), in which there are also some extremely peculiar judgments. Indeed, de Vleeschauwer speaks of a Geulincx-Vico-Croce line of development (261), which evidently makes little sense; furthermore, he maintains that the principle verum factum cannot be found in Malebranche, neither implicitly nor explicitly (271), which is absolutely incorrect. And since he evidently has little sympathy for Malebranche, he thinks that the parallel Geulincx-Pascal is more relevant today than the parallel Geulinck-Malebranche, on the basis of their common “Christian existentialism,” a very vague expression (Vleeschauwer, Three Centuries, 72). In fact, I really do not see how this Geulincx-Pascal parallel could get off the ground. 126 This was said by Brunschvicg who – in Progrés, 215–16 – devotes to Geulincx, because of the general plan of his work, only a few (albeit very intelligent) lines. 127 We ignore whether Malebranche read Geulincx. He certainly does not quote him, but he owned his Questiones quodlibeticae. See Gouhier, La vocation de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1926), 69.

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shared feature among the three major Occasionalists – Geulincx, Malebranche, and Vico. Let us now proceed to examine the presence of the verum factum in the philosophy of Malebranche and the relationship of continuity and opposition (with continuity being prevalent)) that gets established between his thought and Vico’s. Synthetically, we might say: the same principle of verum factum, freed from the possibility of a skeptical inversion through the connection with Ontologism,128 is what leads Malebranche to affirm that the doubt about the reality of the external world is rationally insuperable and Vico, instead, to affirm “civil theology.”129 Let us listen to Malebranche, following the text of the VI Eclaircissement or that, which is equivalent, of the VI Entretien sur la Métaphysique: the existence of bodies cannot be proven perfectly (i.e., proven with geometrical rigour).130 He speaks only of doubting the existence of bodies, but it is clear that, for him (unlike for Berkeley, whose position is very different), this doubt also affects the existence of other finite subjects. Because, in fact, how else can other men be for me data of experience if not through the sensitive experience I have of their bodies? The merely “conjectural” form that he attributes to the knowledge of other spirits is a further confirmation of this. In these writings we truly have the first formulation of the question of solipsism, albeit limited to finite beings.131 Because in matters of philosophy we cannot affirm 128 It is interesting how an interpretation of Vico based only on the verum factum must inevitably take a skeptical turn. A proof of this is provided by the very beautiful, truly decisive pages 103–25 of La vita come arte (Florence: Sansoni, 1943) by Ugo Spirito, who draws the ultimate logical consequences from this kind of interpretation. From the historical standpoint, we might say: separating the verum factum from Ontologism leads, in its ultimate consequences, to exacerbate the skeptical motif that was already in Geulincx (and his learned ignorance). 129 This seems to me the best description of his philosophy. See sections 2, 347, 366, 385 in the second edition of the Scienza Nuova, and, above all, read and reread section 2 to convince yourself that the immanentistic interpretations are impossible. 130 The unity of Idealism and mathematicism has been often asserted, for example, by Brunschvicg in Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Alcan, 1929); and, from a perspective opposite to Brunschvicg’s, by M. Gentile, Il problema della filosofia moderna, part 1 (Brescia: La Scuola, 1950). This text by Malebranche could provide a significant confirmation of this unity. 131 On this point, see L. Robinson, “Le ‘cogito’ cartésien et l’origine de l’idéalisme moderne,” in Revue philosophique 123 (1937): 307–35. According to

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anything except when evidence compels us irresistibly. Otherwise, when our consent is not compelled by evidence, it is we who act, not God who acts in us. Thus, from the rational standpoint we cannot affirm that there are other realities, besides God and our spirit, which we know by awareness, without having science of them. Therefore, the reality of finite existences other than mine can only be known by God in as much as he has created them because he alone knows his acts of will, which produce all beings. Hence, in order to be fully convinced of the reality of the external world, it is necessary to prove not only that there is a God and that God does not deceive but also that he assured us that he really created the world. It is not important now to describe how the transition to this certainty of the divine guarantee works. It is enough to remark that it requires the theory of the necessity of the Incarnation as the justification of creation and, thus, the inclination to theological rationalism that is so visible in his thought.132 Certainly, this role of verum factum leads irrefutably to consequences that are entirely foreign to Vico’s thought. But, from a different angle, we must say that there was objectively room in Malebranche’s philosophy for the verum factum as the foundation of historical knowledge. Indeed, it has been definitively proven, against a contrary opinion that was dominant for many years, that Malebranche is one of the greatest and subtlest theoreticians of human freedom and that, for him, man has a “power” that is certainly “immanent” and “moral” and not “physical” but still capable, by virtue of the general laws that are the immutable rules of God’s action, of determining his freedom towards one external outcome rather than another.133 Therefore, should we not feel authorized to say that man can know historical reality because it was he who “morally” made it?

Robinson, Malebranche’s system is the first modern idealist system, and, in it, the possibility of the solipsistic doubt becomes clear for the first time. It is a thesis that I already fully shared at that time (see “La Veracità divina”). Apparently, a solipsist from the early 1700s, Claude Brunet, was influenced by the thought of Malebranche – on this, see L. Robinson, “Un solipsiste au XVIIIe siècle,” in L’année philosophique 24 (1913): 15–30. 132 On this connection, see my article “La Veracità divina.” 133 See Laporte, “La liberté selon Malebranche,” in Revue de Métaphysique 45 (1938): 339–410, or in Études d’histoire de la philosophie française au XVIIe siecle (Paris: Vrin, 1951), 193–254.

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Moreover, let us consider the system of the general laws of Providence in XIII Entretien, 9. Three groups of general laws are made manifest to us by reason and experience. The first group is that of the general laws of the communication of motions, whose occasional cause is the collisions between bodies. It is through these laws that God has communicated to the sun the power to give light, to fire the power to burn, and so on. The second group is that of the general laws of the union of the soul with the body, whereby I have the power to speak, to walk, to feel sensations, and so on. Through them God unites us to all his works. The third group is that of the general laws of the union of the soul with God, of created reason with universal Reason. The occasional cause of these laws is my attention, and by them I have the power to think and to discover the truth. Then he adds: “these three general laws are the only ones that reason and experience make us know. But the authority of scripture makes us know two more”: the laws that regulate the relations that good and bad angels have with lower beings, and the laws whereby Jesus Christ has received the power to distribute grace. The task of philosophy is to highlight the architecture of the divine work and make us embrace in one gaze the order of nature and the order of grace. Now, is it not strange that history is excluded from this investigation of the abysses of Providence? Should not Providence govern the world of men beside that of nature? And furthermore, does not the New Science expressly contain a fourth system, accessible by the natural light of reason, that of the general laws that govern the course of history? This system is formulated by Vico exactly according to the principles of Occasionalism. We only need to consider the very famous text of the Conclusion of the second New Science: “It is true that men have themselves made this world of nations … but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves; which narrows ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon this earth. Men mean to gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, and they inaugurate the chastity of marriage from which families arise etcetera” (Sec. 1108).134 It cannot be said with greater clarity that human actions are

134 [TN] Vico, New Science, 382.

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mere occasions for the institution in history of an order that is established by Providence, according to immutable laws. The fact that the result transcends men’s particular ends is just another form of the definition of the concept of occasional cause. According to a well-known image, man is the “craftsman” of the world of nations whose “Architect” is the divine mind. Men’s vital advantages are the occasion arranged by God so that his designs may be realized: “This axiom proves that there is divine providence and further that it is a divine legislative mind. For out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, it has made the civil orders by which they may live in human society” (Sec. 133).135 And above all consider this text, which I regard as fundamental: “non igitur utilitas fuit mater iuris et societatis humanae, sive ea sit necessitas, sive metus, sive indigentia, ut Epicuro, Machiavellio, Obbesio, Spinozae, Baylaeo adlubet: sed occasio fuit, per quam homines, natura sociales et originis vitio divisi, infirmi et indigi ad colendam societatem, sive adeo ad celebrandam suam socialem naturam raperentur” (De Uno, Ch. 16).136 It seems to me that the consideration of this identity between Malebranche’s Providence and Vico’s Providence – if we choose to consider it in its concept and not in the different fields of application – is decisively important because it definitively rules out the usual immanentist interpretations of the latter. The immanentist thesis can be summarized as follows: the core of Vico’s theory of Providence is immanentist because its means and its ways are human. The Catholic interpretation would be well founded only if all of human history were patterned after that of the Jews, which is governed by the inscrutable transcendent will of God. But Vico, even though he piously accepts the privileged status of the Chosen People, sets Hebrew history in opposition to that of the rest of humanity, which, unlike it, is made by men and not directly by God, and whose rationality must therefore be sought

135 Ibid., 56. 136 The lines immediately before are also very interesting, in which Grotius’s mistake is said to be that he did not see that the occasion is not the cause. Therefore, according to Vico, the theory of natural law can become rigorously consistent only if it is rethought within ontologist-Occasionalist philosophy. I do not need to emphasize how important this is in order to understand Vico’s “Grotius.”

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in the human mind.137 In response, we must observe that the reason Vico did not talk, except occasionally, about Jewish history and the Christian religion is that, given the nature of his research, he did not have to. His investigation concerned the natural ways of Providence in profane history, and this implied that there would be no reference to the supernatural; just as there could not be any, in Malebranche, in the study of the laws through which Providence regulates the communication of motions. At most, one can say that Vico does not want to extend his investigation to the general laws that, according to Malebranche, also govern the order of the supernatural and of grace; but by doing so he protects its gratuitousness. If we interpret it in a theological sense, his research is for what man can do in the state of “natura lapsa,” and it has a distinctly anti-Jansenist character and tone. So, on the one side Vico conforms perfectly to Malebranche’s thought; moreover, his extension is perfectly legitimate. But, on the other side, if we try to imagine a meeting between Malebranche and Vico, we ought to bet that it would have risked the same outcome as the meeting, whether it really happened or not, between the former and Berkeley. Indeed, to understand the contrast between their attitudes, try to read Malebranche’s famous chapter on L’erreur la plus dangereuse de la philosophie des anciens. In essence, his thought is similar to Vico’s: pagans were able to create their gods because the idea of God remained in fallen man but in a corrupt form due to the prevalence of imagination over reason as a consequence of sin. Thus they ascribed power, a divine attribute, to the so-called forces of nature; and ancient philosophers followed them by attributing forms, faculties, qualities, virtues – in short, causal power – to the bodies. Essentially, Malebranche is facing the question of myth and, due to the principles of his philosophy, can only delineate, regarding its nature, a solution similar to that subsequently affirmed and elaborated by Vico. But whereas this latter rehabilitated the ancient fables for the aspect of truth that remains in them, albeit distorted, and sees a process of providential transformation from the “first divine fable” to God as infinite Mind, Malebranche sets reason 137 I related this sententia communis in the words of G. De Ruggiero, Storia della Filosofia: La filosofia moderna, III, da Vico a Kant (Bari: Laterza, 1941), 56. But it is interesting, and goes to show how widespread this idea is, that a scholar of a completely different orientation, like K. Löwith, reasons in the same way in Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 129–31.

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and myth in most rigorous opposition. By destroying the entities that were a legacy of mythical thought, the Cartesian “philosophie nouvelle” achieves a perfect harmony with the first principle of religion – that we must love and fear only one God – and leads to true harmony in Christians between the heart and intelligence because, as long as Aristotelian philosophy was prevalent, one could say that, while the heart was Christian, the depth of the spirit had remained pagan. We have here the real point of opposition: religious Cartesianism does not know degrees, and not because it is religious but because it is Cartesianism. Absolute truth on one side, error on the other, just as absolute – that is, its thought is “ahistorical” in the sense I mentioned earlier. Therefore, Vico’s “civil theology” could not fit inside Malebranche’s system, even though in a sense it seemed to be a legitimate extension of it, with respect to a question it left open. It was necessary that two of Malebranche’s essential theses be abandoned by Vico: that of the rigorous knowledge of the ideal archetypes of the physical world, and the question of the reality of the external world.138 It was necessary, that is, to criticize Malebranche’s mathematicism and also (it is the same thing) his Idealism; it was necessary to arrive at a position to which the (more recent) terms Idealism and realism could not apply; or equivalently, it was necessary to carry out an inversion to replace the primacy of essence with that of existing reality. It is at this point that we must adequately appreciate Vico’s critique of Cartesianism. A critique that draws its originality, in my judgment, from the fact that it concerns precisely the significant structure of Cartesianism itself; namely, the concession it makes to the libertines, that a philosophy based on a consideration of profane history can only lead to skepticism. Thus, Vico’s adversary is still the same as that of Cartesianism (i.e., libertine thought); he simply deems Cartesian 138 Of course, Vico could not formulate the question precisely in these terms; but I think it is possible to easily show that this was the result of the critique he developed. This fact is quite important because it can be used to show that it is not possible to continue his thought in idealist philosophies. It has been shown (see Laporte, “L’étendue intelligible selon Malebranche,” in Études, 153–92) that Malebranche’s intelligible extension prefigures Kant’s space and that, on this point, he acts as intermediary between Descartes and Kant (which is, anyway, as I mentioned, a common occurrence in pre-Vichian Occasionalism because of its idealist accent). Now Vico, by abandoning this Malebranchian idea of knowledge of the ideal archetypes of physical nature, interrupts precisely the process from Malebranche to Kant.

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thought inadequate to beat it because of its “monastic character.” It seems to me that we reduce the significance of this criticism if we view it merely as a defence, against mathematicism, of the individualizing forces – in the theoretical spirit, imagination; in the practical spirit, power and will; in empirical science, which corresponds to the philosophy of the spirit, barbaric civilization or poetic wisdom. Why then does he insist so much on establishing a kinship, which at first blush is so peculiar and hardly historical, between Cartesian philosophy and stoicism and Jansenist rigourism? The first aspect that Vico’s critique emphasizes is the opposition of the “political” philosopher to the “monastic” philosopher; this is the constant theme, first in De nostri temporis and then in the Risposte al giornale dei letterati and in the Scienza Nuova. In the first text he affirms the inadequacy of Cartesianism with regard to forming civil prudence. In the second, he says: Philosophies have been of no other use to the world than for making nations … Now, the republic of letters was founded at first in such a way that philosophers be satisfied with the probable, and dealing with the true be left to mathematicians. As long as this order was preserved in the world we know about, Greece yielded all the foundations of the sciences and the arts, and those very happy centuries were rich with inimitable republics, enterprises, works, and great words and deeds … The stoic sect arose and, ambitious, it wished to confuse the orders and take the place of mathematicians with that pompous sentence: sapientem nihil opinari; and the republic did not bring any better fruit. On the contrary, an altogether opposite order was born, that of the skeptics, who are completely useless to human society; and they were scandalized by the stoics, because, when they saw them affirm as true what is doubtful, they began to doubt everything.

In this passage we must regard as extremely important the remark about the correlation between stoicism and skepticism, which means, in reference to his time, between Descartes and Bayle. Finally, we have the famous degnità 130 on the opposition between “monastic or solitary philosophers,” stoics and epicureans, and political philosophers, mainly Platonists. So, in my judgment, Vico’s historical vision must be interpreted as follows: for him the critique of mathematicism is a consequence of the critique of an original “monastic” attitude within which mathematicism really does seem to be the only possible way to beat skepticism. For Vico, the non-politicity of Cartesian philosophy is not

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a consequence of mathematicism but, on the contrary, the “conditioning attitude” within which a philosophy of geometric rigour takes shape. I wrote elsewhere: The presence of the libertine moment – the rationalistic interpretation of history – is what gives the French Enlightenment its typical character. It started, around 1680, precisely from the results that the libertine movement, which seemed exhausted in the years between 1655 and 1660, had reached. Bayle’s Dictionnaire realizes the book that Naudé had planned as the conclusion of his thought, the Elenchus rerum hactenus falso creditarum. Think now of what Bayle represents  – the decomposition of Cartesianism, the moment when it loses its metaphysics. Why then does the decomposition of Cartesianism take this form? Why does it coincide with the resurfacing of the libertine background? This suggests the idea that libertine skepticism was the challenge that the spiritualism of the sixteen hundreds did not adequately answer.139

If this is the case, we cannot help wondering whether Vico, who is normally regarded as a bad historian of philosophy, and unaware of the true nature of his own thought, and the “precursor” philosopher par excellence,140 did not, on the contrary, grasp like nobody else the meaning of the thought of the 1600s? Does not the (certainly extremely tortuous) process that leads Vico from the criticism of Descartes to that of Bayle – and not because he considers Bayle a Cartesian; on the contrary, he constantly puts him together with Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes (i.e., with the adversaries of Cartesian stoicism, despite the correlation between stoicism and Epicureanism)141  – define

139 “La crisi libertina e la ragion di stato,” 36. 140 Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Laterza: Bari, 1943), 58–61 [History as the Story of Liberty, trans. S. Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941), 71–4]. 141 See, for example, Diritto Universale, 4, 32, 55, 301, 327. And in the conclusion of the second Scienza Nuova see sections 1109, 1110. This goes to show that going from the juridical treatises to the New Science the adversaries really did not change. The fact that in the Sinopsi of De Uno (4) these five, always mentioned together, are labelled as “skeptics” is also interesting. Without insisting too much now on this appellation, given the oscillations in Vico’s language, it seems nonetheless that such a designation reveals that he viewed the thought of these authors (including, and this is certainly a bit peculiar, Spinoza) in the aspect according to which they participated in the general libertine trend; and that the passage I just recalled from the Risposte

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somehow the “significant structure” within which the operations of Cartesian thought take place and its inadequacy with regard to facing the attack of what we can call, in a broad sense, libertine thought? According to the interpretation that I have sketched here, and that of course I have presented as hypothetical (on top of everything else because the nature of this essay does not allow me to fully prove it), Vico’s thought represents an ulterior step in the development of Malebranche’s rediscovery of Occasionalism. This ulteriority expresses itself in the critique of the significant structure of Cartesianism, within which Malebranche had kept the reaffirmation of Ontologism, with the consequence of accentuating Idealism and theological rationalism – motifs that subsequently were picked up and carried to their conclusions by immanentist thought. Allow me to highlight more analogies in the architecture of the systems. Consider the passage in the second Scienza Nuova in which the principle verum factum is affirmed most clearly: “But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind” (sec. 331). The term “modifications” is certainly drawn from Malebranche.142 Now, what does Vico intend to say? Certainly not that history can be explained through the modifications of the human mind only. Because, in that case, what would be of the “civil theology”? He means, instead, that studying the modifications of the human mind as they manifest themselves in history, as the only reality directly accessible to us, reveals the action of a principle that is irreducible to these modifications themselves. Likewise, Malebranche’s uses the terms “stoicism” and “skepticism” to define the correlation between Cartesianism and libertine skepticism (with the victory of the latter), which I have discussed. Note that in the Risposte this intuition is still vague and grows clearer in the subsequent works. It is interesting to notice that, in the VIII Entretien, 14, Malebranche, in the name of his idea of Order and of the relations of Perfection, which are the foundation of morals, develops a very harsh critique of Hobbes, without naming him, in terms remarkably similar to those of Vico: Hobbes’s conception could only conclude in “turning human society into an assembly of brute beasts.” 142 This observation was already acutely made by Corsano, Giambattista Vico, 220–1.

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Recherche de la Vérité was a study of the modifications of the individual human mind that revealed the presence of an element irreducible to them – the eternal, universal, and necessary ideas – and the presence to the soul of the divine being, as the “place” in which they were seen. By this I do not mean to say that Vico consciously thought of this symmetry. Let us rather say that the symmetry forced itself on him, without being able to know to what extent he was aware of it. But, you may ask, what does Vico “see” in God, after abandoning Malebranche’s idea of the vision of the essence of extended reality? This objection is certainly very important because God’s presence, when it is separated from any idea of “vision,” tends inevitably to take an immanentist flair. Now, we must not forget that for Malebranche the vision of God also concerns “relations of perfection” (which translate, in his Ontologism, Pascal’s “ordre de cœur.” Because of their normativity, and thus of the determination they impose on the movement of the will, they are apprehended differently than relations of magnitude, which leave the subject indifferent), or, as he also says, “the immutable order of justice,” and that, because of this theory, he has recently been regarded as the founder of axiology. There is an immutable universal order that is the foundation of morals. It might seem that we are here at the threshold of “Christian natural law.” On the contrary, when Malebranche moves to the study of social life he becomes, as I have said … as pessimistic as Hobbes.143 Morality remains utterly separate from politics and law. Why this must be the case is all too clear, after what has been said; and the parallel with the nonextension to history of the general laws is perfect. Likewise it is very clear that this is the point where Vico surpasses him, while remaining completely faithful. At any rate, the relationship between vulgar knowledge and reflected knowledge, where the second has only the task of interpreting, rules out every possible idea of sublating religion into

143 Regarding the beginning of axiology, see Gueroult, Descartes t. 2, 33. About “Hobbesian pessimism” (a sentence that perhaps is not too precise but that is substantially accurate with respect to what the author meant to say) and about the separation carried to the extreme by Malebranche between morality and law – whereas his idea of the “Order” might have suggested the opposite – I am happy to recall pages 104–7 in the book by G. Solari, La Scuola del Diritto Naturale nelle dottrine eticogiuridiche dei secoli XVII e XVIII (Turin: Bocca, 1904), which have not grown old, even after so many years.

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philosophy. At most we can say that, after he abandons Malebranche’s theological rationalism, Vico’s Christianity – in fact, his Catholicism – remains a presupposition, a bit in the manner of Descartes, although in a different sense because of the enormous importance he attributes to sin. This parallel is rigorous because we can say that both of them destroy all possible (libertine and Spinozian) objections to religion; however, neither treat explicitly the question of the transition from rational truths to revealed truths. Let us move on to the contemplative aspect of the New Science: “the reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of its places, times and varieties” (sec. 345). What the New Science leads to is a feeling of admiration for the architecture of the universe, considered from the standpoint of its historical laws. But Malebranche had said exactly the same, in reference to the general laws of the physical world: “I do not admire so much the trees covered with flowers and fruits as their marvelous growth as a result of the natural laws.”144 Learning to behold the fabric of the world and the principles of unity that govern it, shifting the attention from the objects to the way in which God fills the world with them, and to the coordination of the various systems of laws: this is the foundation of the aesthetic emotion in its purity according to Malebranche.145 This extremely similar union of aesthetic emotion, science, and piety – the final words of the New Science are “this science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and … if one be not pious he cannot really be wise” – is the deepest feature that manifests the kinship of the two systems.

144 Entretiens, X, 7. 145 At this point the discussion should veer towards Malebranche’s relationship with the art of his time, a topic that has never been covered. See, however, regarding the closeness between the ideas of Malebranche and the art of Guarini, the penetrating remark by C.G. Argan, L’architettura barocca in Italia (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), 62–3. The same discussion ought also to be promoted for the idea of art in the reflected age, according to Vico. At any rate, studies in Vichian aesthetics need to be renewed, too, now that we have understood that it is no longer acceptable to confuse his theory of myth with a theory of art.

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11. CONTINUITY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION Drawing now the conclusions of this long discussion, I will say that, in my judgment, Goldmann is mistaken in identifying a “tragic vision” that supposedly unifies thinkers so distant from each other as Pascal and Kant; and that in reference to Pascal we should speak, rather than of a “tragic vision,” of the extreme radicalization of an “anti-humanism,” which is intrinsic to religious Cartesianism. But, evidently, this is only the least important of the results that I believe I have reached by discussing his thesis: because it has led me to recognize a unified development in the four major thinkers of the time of the Catholic Reformation: Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico; and also a (subordinate) line of development of Occasionalism. Unity, continuity: today these words do not sound right in philosophical historiography. It has been said, and rightly, that the historian must grasp philosophies in their individuality; a seeker of unity is somebody who does not consider the historical situation in which philosophies arose; who regards as irrelevant the study of the biographies of the philosophers; who detaches philosophers from their actual questions in order to understand them in relation to the question of the philosopher who is writing history. However, there is a good way and a bad way of understanding unity. A very bad way is, certainly, that of the self-generation of concepts; that of neglecting “to treat each philosophy as a historical reality in which ideas do not stop being ideas upon becoming a man’s thoughts.”146 With respect to this way of writing history, Gouhier’s remark is certainly impeccable: “Cartesianism would not have generated Spinozism without Spinoza and no history of Cartesianism will prove that Spinoza’s existence was necessary.”147 Things change when unity is looked for or, rather, is presented by history in the unity of the question: meaning the sameness of the adversary that a group of thinkers, despite their differences in psychology and formation, intended to defeat – such as precisely the Molinist Descartes, the Port-Royalist Pascal, the Berullian theocentrist

146 H. Gouhier, La philosophie et son histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1948), 124. 147 H. Gouhier, L’histoire et sa philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1952), 125.

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Malebranche, and the anti-Jansenist humanist Vico. Now, it is interesting to realize that expressly the introduction into the history of philosophy of a serious consideration of atheism leads us to cast doubt, at least as far as the philosophy of the 1600s is concerned, on the usual judgment that says that, after the Renovatio (in its three moments: Renaissance, Reformation, and New Science), the philosophies of transcendence do not “form a chain”; meaning that, in each one of them, we must distinguish an aspect of true research that will take its full meaning in further immanentist or at least secular philosophies, an aspect of critical demolition of the past, and an antiquated attempt at reconciling with tradition, which at best can achieve the academic result of being non-contradictory; meaning that the process of secularization that is undeniable in German philosophy, from Leibniz to Marx, marked by the progressive abandonment of the idea of theodicy, can be extended to the entirety of modern thought. Instead, to express my full thought, modern philosophy can only be defined problematically, in connection with the appearance of the problem of atheism, and its essential and irreducible lines of development are two, not one. While this definition in terms of a problem, associated with the appearance of a new essence, confirms that the Cartesian beginning is inescapable, it rules out the idea of a “radical error of modern philosophy,” no matter whether it is affirmed in Catholic or Heideggerian terms, and the possibility of a simple return to previous traditions. Although, of course, it does not at all rule out the possibility that a deeper study thereof may coincide with encountering those traditions, to the point of recognizing that new positions are explications of their virtualities. This is precisely what Cartesian thinkers failed to achieve, first of all by exasperating, at the philosophical level, the opposition of Augustinism and Thomism, and subsequently by splitting Augustinism in two. In Vico this possibility remains limited to a reaffirmation of humanism separated from what had led to the heretical aspects of Renaissance thought. Tying together more deeply the history of philosophy and the history of culture has made it possible to give the libertine trend the importance it deserves as the intermediary between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, acting in the 1600s above all in France and, as a repercussion, in Italy. In this connection, it has made it no longer possible to separate the “letter” from the “spirit” in the philosophies of Descartes and Vico in the name of Cartesianism and Vichianism “de jure.”

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So, in Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico the adversary is the same; and there is a unity that establishes itself, albeit through extremely serious contrasts, in the process of their philosophies: the ideal essence that is reached is that of Ontologism. In this unitary process the ideal essences of all subsequent philosophies can be discerned and can be investigated at the moment of their genesis. Leaving aside the obligatory reference of every modern philosophy to Descartes, which I already discussed, I will mention: the essences of criticism and theological existentialism in Pascal; that of Idealism in the “theocentric revolution” of Geulincx and Malebranche, and in this latter also the essence of the shadow that goes along with Idealism, solipsism, and those of logicism and psychologism; the conditions that make possible the transition of empiricism to its rigorous critical form in Hume are found in Pascal and Malebranche; in Vico we have humanism in its final form of maturation and in its irreducibility to the categories of Idealism and realism, and the problem of history. This view calls into question another common idea, that of the “cultural sterility of the Counter-Reformation,” because the philosophies of the four authors we have considered operate within the CounterReformation’s essential intuition: the nexus between lowering man and reducing God to pure irrational power, which applies also to PortRoyalism, as we have seen. I said that the ideal essence that takes shape at the end of this process is that of Ontologism. Does this essence still have a meaning today? And in what terms can it be reaffirmed? And how does it relate not only to the Augustinian tradition but also to Thomism in its most serious interpretation? Regarding the first two questions, one of the problems that must be solved first is the exact definition of the defeat that befell Actualism in its attempt – wherein lies its originality – to move beyond the Ontologism of Gioberti and Rosmini in a reformation of Hegelian dialectics.148

148 In reference to what was said in the Introduction on the inseparability, today, of philosophical discourse from political discourse, it becomes important that, since the beginning (precisely since Rosmini e Gioberti), Actualism was associated by its author (with the most sincere passion) to the question of the Risorgimento and viewed as the philosophy of its fullness, whereas its fate was to become the philosophy of its crisis – and not because of any subjective responsibility of Gentile but out of an ideal

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In fact, Actualism is the necessary form, the only truly consistent one, that Hegelianism must assume to reaffirm itself, as philosophy of the immanence of the divine, after both Marxism and Ontologism and, thus, after both the criticism of religion developed by the Hegelian left and the Catholic Italian philosophy of the Risorgimento. It does this by realizing a very peculiar coincidence of Marxism dissociated from materialism, and philosophy of the presence of the divine dissociated from any reference to the transcendent. The fact that Gentile started his activity as a writer with a book on Marx and one on Rosmini and Gioberti, which were written almost simultaneously, takes in this regard a symbolic significance, and I do not know if this has ever been noticed before. Therefore, a deeper critical study of the genesis and defeat of Actualism can be the precise verification of the vision of the history of modern philosophy to which we have arrived starting from the problem that was most extraneous to him – that of atheism.149

necessity whose nature must still be rigorously defined – in perfect symmetry with the fact that it seems to verify exactly, from the theoretical standpoint, the criticisms advanced (albeit in often uncertain form) by Ontologism against “subjectivism.” 149 Thus, the rigour with which Gentile’s research was conducted is such that only after having examined it can one undertake a truly critical study of Rosmini – and especially of the greater Rosmini, that of the Teosofia – in order to define his present relevance, also with respect to the current rediscoveries of Ontologism.

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Political Theism and Atheism (1962)

I said that atheism finds its own criterion of truth in the determination that transcendent thought has been surpassed by history in the twofold and inseparable sense that it cannot account for its development and cannot serve as guide in actual historical-political choices.1 I also said that atheism always goes together with forms of negation of freedom: with the harshest form of absolutism, in the libertines; with totalitarianism, in Marxism; and we can also think of Hobbes, whose atheism is a hypothesis that is certainly possible, and can be supported with good arguments, and who was in any case among the first to “conceive a politics with the clear intention of excluding from its principles the divine.”2 Limiting ourselves now to the most radical form of positive atheism, it is an obvious observation that what corresponds from the political standpoint to its primary adversary from the philosophical

1 Regarding the connection that exists today between the religious, the philosophical, and the political question, Maritain writes perfectly: “whereas, over the centuries, the crucial questions for religious thought have been first of all the great ideological controversies on the dogmas of the faith, today the crucial questions concern above all political theology and political philosophy” (Raison et Raisons [Paris: LUF, 1947], 182). 2 R. Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), XV–XVI. Polin himself, in his subsequent book La politique morale de John Locke (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), highlights, instead, the depth of the religious motif that underpins Locke’s ethical-political thought. On the connection between atheism and negation of freedom, see the splendid pages by R. Guardini, “Der Atheismus und die Möglichkeit der Autorität,” in Il problema dell’ ateismo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962), 199–207.

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standpoint, theism, and more precisely the religious God (see pages 299–300), is liberalism. After all, this relationship is perfectly defined by Marx himself: Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being … only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

These passages are from “On the Jewish Question” of 1844. It is an extremely interesting work because the selfishness of bourgeois society is traced back to Jewish-Christian “subjectivism” and individualism, to which is opposed the notion of species-being (Gattungwesen), which will then be the core theme of the Manuscripts of 1844. Thus, Christianity is criticized as individualist, by reason, that is, of that connection between finite individuality and evil that is the necessary presupposition of rationalism, as negation of Creation and Fall. Here the discussion should be broadened: the first datum of rationalist ethics is the far-from-obvious reduction of individualism to selfishness; the negation of the connection, which is proper to traditional Christian ethics, between love of Order, desire for happiness, and love of the Good. We can see to what extent the habits of rationalist ethics have triumphed by considering how little religious moralists emphasize this point today.3 3 A deeper exploration of this issue should lead one to consider the extremely important dispute on quietism, about which see the very remarkable book by Fr Y. de Montcheuil, Malebranche et le quietisme (Paris: Aubier, 1946), which builds on the studies on the Thomist doctrine of love by P. Rousselot, and which highlights well the perspicacity of Malebranche’s critique. In fact, the importance in the history of philosophy of this dispute on pure love – as an anticipation, in the quietists, of the more questionable aspects of Kantian morality – had already been pointed out by scholars who today have been forgotten, such as P. Janet, La morale (Paris: Delagrave, 1887), 104; and G. Zuccante, Aristotele e la morale (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1926), 112–13.

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But it is not possible now to adequately treat this topic, which, if analyzed rigorously, would lead to clarifying the unsurmountable opposition between rationalism and liberalism.4 We must focus our attention, instead, on the extremely curious fact that many Catholic as well as the majority of non-Communist seculars seem to try as hard as they can to ignore the Marxist correlation between the negation of the religious God and that of liberalism. And “open” Catholics do so more than backward Catholics, open seculars more than conservatives. Let us outline schematically the customary argument, which originated in Maritain and is widespread among the vast majority of today’s Catholic intellectuals. The civilization that came out of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and was continued by the Enlightenment, replaced true humanism, which is theocentric, with anthropocentric humanism. In it the affirmation of the person changes into that of the absolute freedom of the individual, accompanied by trust in a rational order of things, whereby a cosmic harmony reconciles the quest for private advantages into universal well-being. God as origin and end is replaced by God at the service of man, God with the task of harmonizing the outcomes of the explication of individual freedoms. In short, it is the idea of a “guarantor” God, which is universally embraced by the rationalism and empiricism of the 1600s and 1700s, including the thinkers who, in their interior forum, were most persuaded of serving God’s cause (Descartes, Leibniz). Supposedly, the affirmation of the absolute freedom of the individual, accompanied by trust in a rational order that guarantees his knowledge and his action, constitutes the essence of liberalism. Its fruits are the capitalist and bourgeois regimes and, thus, the conflict between classes, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. Therefore, it is precisely from the historical result of liberalism that the Communist opposition originates;

Maritain has spoken very well, with regard to atheism, of “a new kind of pure mystical love,” as “a renunciation of all hope of personal redemption,” but “bought at the price of what in us is an end in itself and the image of God” (La signification, 19). As a matter of fact, because of what I have already said, atheism cannot help developing, in the moral aspect, an aspect that was already present in the doctrine of pure love. 4 I say this, of course, in reference to the definition of rationalism given on pages 10ff. Who would be willing, today, to include Spinoza and Hegel among the classics of liberalism?

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its fault is that of being an opposition by mere inversion, that is, of sharing liberalism’s worldly and immanent presupposition; however, this error is motivated by a just moral reaction against the capitalist order and by a no less just reaction against the philosophical God who supposedly provides its guarantee. Finally, there is, in the modern world, a third position, the one that can be called, with a generic term, “Fascism.” It is an absorption of the human person into a collective entity that, in its first and still rational forms, will present itself as an “ethical State,” which will then take an irrational form in the nation and in the subsequent cult of the Leader, which, finally, will find its point of arrival in racism. It is immediately clear that, in this vision, the condemnation of liberalism carries much greater importance than that of Marxism. Supposedly, the result of liberalism has been the destruction of the communitarian spirit that was proper to the Middle Ages, the replacement of the person by the individual, as a naturalistic entity. By contrast, socialism must be viewed as an inadequate attempt at surpassing liberalism. Socialism has a historical truth in as much as it describes exactly the world to which the success of the bourgeoisie has led; and supposedly the rise of the Fascisms is a historical verification that the liberal error is more serious. That is, liberalism and Fascism are two successive manifestation of the same mentality – the bourgeois spirit. Liberalism is the political ideology of the bourgeoisie during its ascending stage; Fascism, its reactionary moment. If I may use a historical analogy, the attitude of the Catholic left with respect to liberalism and Communism is strictly similar to that of Jansenism, or at least of typical Jansenism, with respect to Molinism and Protestantism; and this is, perhaps, the only historical analogy that applies. At that time, too, it was a matter of realizing an alliance between opposites, between partial truths, which had become errors in their exclusive and one-sided affirmation; but, in effect, in a typical Jansenist the hostility towards the adversary within Catholicism, the Molinist, was much greater than that towards the external adversary, the Protestant. This was the case because, in his eyes, the new Molinist Pelagianism turned into an introduction to naturalism and deism, which were the ideological covers for the new bourgeois spirit, just as, mutatis, for a leftist Catholic, liberalism, through the bourgeois regimes it originated, has been the premise of irrationalist and Fascist totalitarianisms. And liberalism can today again be the condition for a return of Fascism in a different and, at least initially, embryonic form.

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For secular people liberalism is tied to the idea that truth is historical, human, and so on. So that its negation depends on the idea of “absolute truth,” the truth that claims to be “the only true one,” and which instead is “the only false one” in as much as it denies history and the plurality of perspectives, which are all authentic since they match the infinite mobility of reality, and is the negation of the spirit of understanding and tolerance. So that in Marxism we should distinguish two souls, one theological and one historicist; the first derives from a realistic mindset that underpins all theocracies, ranging from that conceived by St Thomas to that of Lenin or Stalin. Thus, totalitarianisms are reduced to the theocratic model.5 Clearly, I cannot share either one of these two viewpoints. I will ­schematically present my position in a group of theses that I can only enunciate.

1 . T h e P o s t u l at e o f P r o g r e s s a n d t h e P o s t u l at e o f S i n I. Does the typology of worldviews that I have outlined so far not also apply to political positions? Indeed, we can distinguish one conception that sees human reality as really or absolutely transformable with respect to what concerns moral good or evil; we can generically call it the conception of the Enlightenment since it is characterized by the extension of the idea of progress to the world of history. And we can identify another conception that, on the contrary, is characterized by the postulate of sin: progress is limited to the scientific and technical field, and at every time in history there is the same possibility for evil, and the task of the politician is to minimize it, without claiming, however, to be able to destroy it at its root.6 5 Indeed, it is a commonplace that transcendence equals authoritarianism, and immanence equals liberalism – a commonplace that Croce has reproposed and popularized, and which is still alive in the mainstream press. 6 The expressions “postulate of progress” and “postulate of sin” are taken from Renouvier, Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques (Paris: Au bureau de la critique philosophique, 1885). Renouvier’s very distinctive spiritual experience – which arrives at a theology of Creation and sin by deepening the liberalism of Science de la Morale (1869) – is almost unknown, although it deserves a lot of attention. Regarding the approach – which is, in a particular sense, liberal – to “the

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II. The first conception is characterized by the idea of the “direction of history” and of the salvation of the individual achieved by participating in it. The direction of history is meaningfully oriented in such a way that the reality of evil keeps shrinking, where this shrinking can be viewed either as a necessity or as a possibility tied to human will. The interpreter of this direction of history is the Politician or, if you prefer, the State, the Party, which has not only the right but also the duty to strike at the individuals who oppose it because, by doing so, it executes against them the verdict that history has pronounced. Hence its dominative conception of power. III. We must distinguish three fundamental types of progressive position. In the first, the radical one – its most authentic expression is Condorcet7 – social progress follows from the diffusion of the light of reason; thus, it is a type of progressivism that rejects Terror. Shall we say that it rejects every persecution and makes the idea of tolerance its banner? Or, shall we rather say that it is always and inevitably tempted to choose as a model the persecution by another one of its heroes, Julian the Apostate, which supposedly failed because it was inspired by the ancient type of rationalism? Do we not hear its echo, after all, in Combes’s bloodless persecution during the early years of our century? The second type is the revolutionary position, characterized by the critique of the Enlightenment that I have already highlighted. After its crisis, we have the evolutionary position, in which the “end” of history is set aside altogether; it is characterized by an inversion whereby the value of democracy (i.e, of a technical instrument), understood as a rapid turnover of the élites, takes priority over that of liberalism. IV. Conversely, in a politics that obeys the postulate of sin, the struggle against evil and the realization of a relative degree of perfection is the question of socialism as the question of atheism,” the classic authors are Dostoevsky (see what is still Berdyaev’s essential book, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater [London: Sheed and Ward, 1934]); and Rosmini (see P. Piovani, La teodicea sociale di Rosmini [Padua: Cedam, 1957]). 7 One of the philosophically most rigorous expressions of the radical mindset is found in the chapter that Brunschvicg devotes to Condorcet in Le progrès, 476–84. The terms in which he defines precisely Condorcet’s opposition to Rousseau are important (483). Brunschvicg sees Rousseau as the initiator, at the same time, of the two mindsets he detests, the traditionalist and the revolutionary.

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task of the individual and,8 thus, is a struggle that can, indeed, minimize evil, which is beatable in that precise moment and at that precise point, but cannot extinguish it at its root; and the politician’s ministerial and

8 I prefer the term “individual” rather than “person” because today the latter is too often used in a way that makes the communitarian aspect completely dominant. In fact, this preference is shared by many people; I will recall Capograssi and two Catholic scholars closely associated with him by a very similar moral experience, Sergio Cotta and Gabrio Lombardi. But also C. Ottaviano, according to whom “the supreme task of the State is to make the individual an individual,” to establish the conditions for “the complete free explication of what is most exquisitely individual in the individual” (La soluzione scientifica del problema politico [Naples: Rondinella, 1954], 104–5), a work that is a condensation at the political level of his Metafisica dell’essere parziale (Naples: Rondinella, 1954), which is devoted expressly to the metaphysical definition of the notion of individual. Of course, this does not mean embracing the atomistic conception of individuals, which is proper to classical liberalism, because by doing that one would deny precisely the nature of the individual as being defined by reference to another. Needless to say, the critique of progressivism does not at all rule out (on the contrary!) the idea of juridical and social progress. What it does rule out is the thesis of “perfectism,” exactly defined by Rosmini as “the system which believes in the possibility of perfection in human affairs and sacrifices present benefits for some imagined future perfection” [TN: Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Politics, vol. 1, trans. Denis Cleary and Terence Watson (Durham UK: Rosmini House, 1994), 74]. The consequences [of perfectism] are the suppression of freedom – because otherwise, as Rosmini also says, “the ideal that has been achieved would be in a state of unstable perfection, exposed to all the attacks of the individuals who are averse, for one reason or another, to that ideal of perfection” [TN: this is actually a sentence about Rosmini written by Italian philosopher Pietro Piovani in La teodicea sociale di Rosmini, 370] – the devaluation of past history and the deification of future history, the necessity of regarding original sin as an eliminable residue, and the reduction of the individual to his social relationships. It must be remarked that history’s horrors have generally found their justification in the perfectist principle. Consider the most deplorable aspects of the exploitation of labour in the past century (e.g., the exploitation of child labour): did they not find their justification in the paradisiacal state to which the liberist principle, understood in the theological form in which it presented itself at that time, was supposed to lead? As for the horrors of our century, the way they have been justified is all too clear. Nor can one understand why the postulate of sin should debilitate the struggle against evil; on the contrary, it implies a constant struggle against this or that historical form of evil, albeit knowing that the root of evil cannot be extinguished politically; and that juridical and social progress is utterly insufficient with respect to it. For example, liberalism certainly implies the rule of law; but will anybody argue that the reciprocal is also true, that the rule of law implies the reality of liberalism in its ethical meaning? It is obvious that it is quite possible to effectively establish a tyranny while formally respecting the rule of law.

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not dominative task is that of establishing the best conditions to facilitate this struggle. What evil? The definition can change. In a society characterized by unity of faith, evil will be identified above all with any attack on what is thought to be the objective truth; in a society characterized by a plurality of spiritual families – after the discovery of plurality, and thus after the acquisition of the sense of historicity and of the importance and ontological character of the personal itinerary towards the truth – evil will be identified above all with the forced imposition of the truth. In the first type of society, the politician will put might at the service of the truth; in the second, his concern will be instead to prevent the method of persuasion being replaced by that of violence. However, this distinction must not be changed into opposition: such change leads to the false problem of tolerance, which is unsolvable at the philosophical level and amenable of solution only at the practical and prudential level. This is the case because, in this conception, the idea of truth and the idea of freedom are correlative terms, so that their negation is complementary. Indeed, no one among the fieriest advocates of the traditional characters of truth – objectivity, eternity, necessity, immutability – ever thought of equating a truth imposed by force with a truth accepted by interior persuasion; because in that case truth would be reduced to force in the hands of the politician, the guardian of the city; it would lose its character of eternity and acquire the merely sociological character of being a necessary element for the preservation of a political community; religion would be debased to closed religion. We would move towards a Machiavellian-libertine-Hobbesian conception of politics, certainly not perfectist9 but still marked by a form of realism totally different from the Christian one: this point is important in order to pinpoint the historical position of Machiavellianism as a degeneration of Christian realism. This misunderstanding about the term “realism” has led to completely erroneous judgments about the relation between Machiavellianism and Marxism. Think, on the other hand, of a society in which the plurality of values is regarded as irreducible. As a consequence, dialogue, and therefore persuasion, would become impossible because dialogue could only get to acknowledge this plurality, the existence of what would amount to irreducible moral species. In such a 9 [TN] I translate as “perfectist/perfectism” the Italian “perfettista/perfettismo,” which needs to be distinguished from “perfezionismo” (perfectionism) because it refers to a political doctrine and not to a psychological trait.

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conception the various spiritual families could only dominate by force, even if the technique of freedom were recognized as the rule of coexistence. The strongest spiritual family may even recognize the right to self-expression but as a matter of fact would prevent the other freedoms from expressing themselves. The concept of a pure democracy, as a neutral ideal, so to speak, acceptable by the most diverse positions of thought, must therefore be regarded as the most irrational among political concepts. V. Thus, the non-perfectist conception actually has presuppositions of a metaphysical nature: the absoluteness and transcendence of the truth. I will make this stronger: its ultimate presupposition is a generically Christian political theology – namely, accepting that there is a reality higher than man, accepting the Fall. Any state inspired by it will flourish only when religiosity in a transcendent sense is alive in the culture and in popular awareness. The present crisis of authority in the Western world, whose inspiration is the ministerial conception of power, stems from the crisis of this awareness. That is, only the restoration of “authority” (auctoritas from augere) can really prevent the decline of social relationship into relationships of force. VI. If we consider the problem in its strictly conceptual aspect, that is, in relation to ideal archetypes and independently of their reference to current political parties, we can say that the socialist conception is essentially perfectist because it is founded on the conviction that the historical period that mankind has come through until today, characterized by conflicts among individual consciences, must be succeeded by another period characterized by the dominance of collective life and awareness, in which these conflicts will be pacified and surpassed; even though there is, as we shall see, a form of ethical socialism – which, however, is called socialism improperly – that has a non-perfectist character. In liberalism we can distinguish two forms, the perfectist and the non-perfectist. By way of contrast, Christian thought is essentially antiperfectist, although subject to penetrations by perfectist thought. About the impossibility of mediating between two types, we can say that various recent theorizations of reconciliation must be discarded: first of all, that between liberalism and socialism, which was so common between 1930 and 1945; then the more recent neo-Enlightenment conception, which regards Marxism somehow as the legitimate heir of liberalism, even

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though then it views it as in some way still tainted by the theocratic error; then the reconciliation between Christianity and socialism, and also that between Christianity and the perfectist form of liberalism, which marked a considerable part of the liberal Catholicism of the 1800s.10 VII. An example of the perfectist form of liberalism is the thesis that there is a connection, thought to be unbreakable, between liberalism and liberism,11 in the name of the deistic theodicy of cosmic harmonies, which dates back to the Enlightenment. It claims that general laws established by Providence ensure the agreement between individual advantage and collective advantage, so that complete economic freedom will end up leading to universal well-being. In reference to this form of liberalism, which, at the time of Capital, could seem to have been completely realized, the Marxist critique is perfectly rigorous,12 even though it has the flaw of being kept within perfectism. Also perfectist is the foundation of liberalism in the empiricism that came afterwards which preserves the unity of liberalism and liberism but separates it from the theological aspect and links it instead with an evolutionary conception; I am thinking, for instance, of the foundation of economic liberism in

10 We must beware mythologizations of this liberal Catholicism; the genuine exceptions to the agreement with perfectist liberalism are actually very few. 11 [TN] I use the word “liberism” to translate the Italian Liberismo, which corresponds to “economic libertarianism”or “laissez-faire capitalism” in the Englishspeaking world. 12 For a Christian philosophy, understanding history certainly means being willing to grasp the positivity, from the standpoint of the providential rule of things, of everything that happens. There is no doubt that in order to make manifest the reality of poverty in the industrial society of the nineteenth century what was necessary was not only socialism but also its atheistic form, so well was such reality covered by the cultural positions of the age, not excluding a certain religious spiritualism founded on the idea of worthiness and culpability and inclined not to recognize the misfortune of  the unworthy. Having said this, many people insist that, until today, no anthropology has been as radical as the Marxist in denouncing the flaws and errors of mankind’s systems of life until Communism; and that none has been as radical in affirming the commitment necessary to modifying the previous system as well as the possibility of moving past inferior conditions and of achieving a real unity of mankind. We only need to remark that today historical reality has completely changed, above all precisely as a result of Marxism becoming history, and that it is at least extremely doubtful that Marxism can be used to denounce the evils internal to a reality that it itself generated.

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von Mises. Also perfectist is, finally, the conception of conservative liberalism, whereby justice means guaranteeing freedom for all in the historically given social conditions. This is because in this position one ends up affirming that such social conditions are the ultimate, in a certain way perfect, result of the historical process. In reference to conservative liberalism, the thesis of what we call ethical socialism – because it coincides with the development in the political and social field of the second formula of the Kantian imperative – is perfectly valid: justice is the establishment of social conditions such that everybody may find in them the exterior possibility to realize himself as a person. We must only point out that this position can be called socialism only improperly, given that the content of its finality is individual and that it carries to the extreme the ministerial conception of power.13 In Croce’s thought we have a form of liberalism with an anti-perfectist intention: he truly understood that the problem of today’s liberalism, of its reaffirmation after the socialist antithesis, coincides with the question of whether it can break away from the perfectist form. However, can we say that he succeeded? Or does his political philosophy rather go to prove that a historicist foundation of liberalism is impossible? The reasons it must necessarily fall back into the perfectism of conservative liberalism will be highlighted later on. VIII. At this point we can move on to a brief discussion of how the perfectist stance insinuates itself into Christian thought and of the texts that deserve particular attention. I think we can propose the following general thesis: today perfectism penetrates Christian thought to the extent that socialism is not regarded as a dialectic reagent that forces liberalism to break away from perfectism and its practical consequences in order to reaffirm itself but, rather, as the premise for a “new Christendom” that will be superior to medieval Christendom and that, above all,cuts at the root the flaws of Counter-Reformation Christianity. Now, this penetration can be observed in the trend of Catholic thought that took shape after 1930 and that sets itself apart from so-called 13 See Juvalta, Il vecchio e il nuovo problema della morale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1914), 320n1. We can say that, whereas the perfectist forms of liberalism and socialism are in radical opposition, so that every attempt at reconciliation turns out to be merely eclectic, conversely liberalism and socialism in non-perfectist form essentially tend to become identical.

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integralism because, at the theoretical level, it rejects the archeological utopia and the medievalist myth, and, in practice, the defensive association with every conservative form, or he subversive association with Fascist forms. And it also sets itself apart from modernism because it rejects its immanentist tendency, emphasizing transcendence instead; this emphasis makes it possible to separate Christianity from the Christendoms of history and to abandon the thesis that the ideal pursued by Medieval Christendom is the only and definitive model of Christendom. Certainly, all indications are that Catholic thought cannot go back to where it was before taking this new direction, which is still being elaborated; but this does not take away the fact that, in most of the forms in which it has expressed itself, it has suffered the penetration of perfectism. To begin from the beginning, the presence of a perfectist germ in Maritain’s position itself has already been defined with rigorous precision. It is no more than a germ, which enters in an involuntary, and I would almost say unaware, fashion, but which is still destined to blossom in the theoretical formulations that follow Integral Humanism (1934) and more so in the works and in the ideal and practical orientations of his continuators. This presence has been illustrated in a definitive manner by an exceedingly benevolent critic, Fr Fessard,14 who rightly rejected all the other criticisms that were made against Maritain: subjectivism, naturalism, evolutionism, historicism. Maritain has accepted not only the notion of class but also the exclusive dualism of proletariat and bourgeoisie, the unity of the proletariat, the agreement between Christians and Marxists concerning the existence of classes and their conflict – in short, notions that are meaningful only within historical materialism. Or, better, I believe we can say that Maritain’s thought has two sides: on one it seems oriented towards a reconciliation between Catholic thought and non-perfectist liberalism and, through it, with the ethical and non-perfectist socialism I mentioned. This direction is blocked by the surreptitious introduction of the concept of class in a properly Marxist sense, which he tries to attenuate and justify but without really succeeding. How could this happen, given that he did recognize that atheism is essential to Marxism? Should we speak of a necessity of essences – that is, of a necessity intrinsic to the neo-Thomist vision of the history of philosophy? Can this lead us to say that the

14 Fessard, De l’actualité historique (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1960), 181–91.

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insurmountable contradiction in which he ends also marks the end, certainly not of Thomism, but of the neo-Thomist commentary on St Thomas, which is something else entirely? I already talked (pages 60 and 327–8) about the origins of this commentary as the endpoint of the Catholic anti-modern of the 1800s: the “Catholic anti-modern” began with De Maistre’s intuition about the demonic character of the revolutionary event. This attitude looks back at the revolution not so much as a political event, in the sense of abolishing privileges, but as a spiritual event, as the outcome in all domains of public and social life of a spirit that by then had been informed for over a century by hostility against Christianity. If we call this “anti-­ modern” integralism, nothing is more visible than the fact that it always goes together with its brother-enemies, modernism and progressivism. The transition to progressivism has indeed taken place in all forms of thought that have accepted the integralist vision of history: in traditionalism with Lamennais, in Ontologism with Gioberti,15 in the Thomist renaissance with modernism in the early decades of our century, and with progressivism since 1935. The re-occurrence of this process suggests that it is a necessary phenomenon. What is the nature of this necessity? I think – and here I am formulating a hypothesis about a historical investigation that so far has never been conducted – that it reflects a subordination to the secular spirit, in the form of opposition as inversion, a subordination that is found at the very start. Indeed, when De Maistre and Bonald considered the relation between the Revolution and the culture of the Enlightenment, they were forced to invert the first organization of the secular view of history, that by Bayle, which conditioned the Enlightenment. In his work, the three rebellions against authority on the part of Protestantism, Cartesianism, and libertine skepticism, which until then had been in conflict, had come together for the first time. As a consequence of this we understand the definition of the modern world as characterized by the rejection of all authorities higher than individual conscience, which implies the rejection of God’s sovereignty and, above all, of God the revealer; in short, 15 The Gioberti problem is particularly interesting because, in his thought, as presented in the Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, the (explicitly declared) development of the Malebranche-Vico line and the anti-modern historiographic scheme, carried to its extreme consequences, coexist. How far can this co-presence go to explain his uncertainties and contradictions?

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we understand the characterization of the modern world as subjectivism. It is at this point that we understand why the work on Bayle and Vico that I mentioned in the Introduction is absolutely necessary: in order to show the difference between the stances of De Maistre and Vico regarding Bayle, and thus to clarify the possibility of a different Catholic vision of the history of modern philosophy than the one that formed in the 1800s and is still dominant today, in its opposite forms. In other words, whereas Bayle’s reduction of Cartesianism to a method created the conditions to mediate the unification between two lines of thought that, until then, had been opposed – the libertine trend and iusnaturalism – thus making possible the total secularization of iusnaturalism and the transition from irreligion in a defensive position (libertinism) to irreligion ready to go on the offensive (Enlightenment), Vico – who, like De Maistre, in his critique targets Bayle’s idea of a possible society of atheists – through the critique of Cartesianism dissociates natural law from the Enlightenment and claims it for Catholic thought. That is, in Vico we have not the simple negation of the modern but the enucleation within it of a positive moment that, however, is not the Enlightenment and revolutionary moment. Going back now to Maritain, let us recall the general outline of his process of thought: it goes from anti-modern to the extreme (in his works up to Primauté du spirituel [1927]) to ultra-modern, in the sense that the humanism of the modern world realizes in an incorrect fashion (because it is anthropocentric) the humanism that was already theorized by St Thomas, and that, therefore, only a return to a living Thomism can save the positive values of the modern world, setting the stage for a new Christendom, in which the medieval truth of theocentrism and the modern truth of humanism may be united. Just as for Lamennais in the case of traditionalism, and for Gioberti in the case of Ontologism, which in the 1800s was thought with an anti-modern intention (and this coincidence, too, must be noted because it points to an important characteristic in the formation of the Catholic vision of history), the occasion for this development was a political situation: the question that the (entirely unforeseen) fact of the fascisms forced on Catholic thought. Because the fascisms (I use this term in the plural for the sake of brevity, although I already said that Fascism and Nazism are positions that are irreducible to each other) seemed, on the one hand, to welcome some aspects of the Catholic critique of the modern world (the negation of both liberalism and socialism, the corporatist order, etc.) and,

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on the other hand, linked this critique to a general attitude that we can generically call vitalist and irrationalist or, even more generically, an extremization of closed religion. Maritain was thinking within the stillEurocentric perspective of the 1930s when, precisely because nobody was looking outside Europe, the offensive by the fascisms seemed irresistible, and the essential poles in the struggle seemed to be Fascism versus democracy. Unlike other Catholic thinkers – Carl Schmitt, to cite the most significant – Maritain opted for democracy; but this option forced him to rethink the Catholic philosophy of history and politics, which must be recognized as a sign of how much implicit philosophical richness is contained in contemporary history. In the transition from anti-modern extremism to the affirmation of the ultra-modern, from reactionary thought to democracy, one cannot deny the symmetry between the development of Maritain’s thought and that of Lamennais. This parallel becomes more persuasive if we recall that Maritain is the pupil and the continuator of the last of the great reactionary writers, and of the most virulent critic of democracy – Bloy; so that the relations Bonald-Lamennais and Bloy-Maritain can be compared. Let us say there is a symmetry between them and no more because an Argentinian theologian, Meinvielle, has affirmed that Maritain’s thought reproduces in Thomist language that of Lamennais. Now, this thesis, against which Maritain reacted extremely harshly, seems mistaken to me, too; but this does not take away from the fact that the formal symmetry is undeniable, and that it is of some importance, because it poses the problem of the necessity of the penetration of perfectist elements into Catholic thought in the transition from the pure reactionary position to the democratic position. Certainly, we cannot speak of modernism in reference to Maritain, by virtue of the intrinsic strength of his Thomism; we can speak, instead, of a line of lesser resistance with respect to the resurgence of modernism. It marks the moment when neo-Thomism, on whose foundation the resistance to the first modernism had been organized, seems in danger of capitulating to the second. In fact, observe the following: in Maritain there is a reconciliation with modern political values, not at all with modern philosophy; actually, the greatest radicalization of the condemnation of modern philosophy – by returning to a pure Thomism, in some fashion an existential Thomism as opposed to the essential Thomism of the commentators (hence his closeness to Gilson) – coincides with the reconciliation with the ethical-political values that have been

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highlighted by the modern world but that can be saved only by returning to pure Thomism. Now it is important to show that the degree of penetration by perfectism that I described takes place starting from his vision of the history of philosophy. Indeed, how will Maritain envision the history of modern philosophy, given that the discovery of the subject must, in itself, be considered a positive value? The habitual neo-Thomist critique of modern philosophy was that of being subjectivist; Maritain finds himself forced to reform it. Then, what will be the fundamental error of all the rationalism and all the empiricism of the 1600s and 1700s? Precisely the idea of a “guarantor” God, of a philosophical God separated from the religious God, the replacement of the person by the individual that I discussed earlier. Individualism, philosophical God, trust in a rational order of things: these are philosophical positions that can be extremely easily translated, at the political level, into the unity between the concepts of liberalism and bourgeoisie. Indeed, what is the endpoint of individualism accompanied by trust in a rational order of things if not the homo oeconomicus of classical liberal economics? And, on the other hand, is not this idea of God as guarantor and guardian of order exactly the characteristic idea of God of the bourgeois class? In fact, it is intriguing to observe that this Thomistic interpretation of the Christian metaphysics of the baroque age essentially agrees with that of Goldmann, which is formulated starting from a consideration of the origins of the idea of bourgeoisie.16

16 See Maritain’s Cartesian studies, Les trois réformateurs: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1925); La songe de Descartes (Paris: R.A. Corrêa, 1932); and, above all, the vision of history in Humanisme Intégral. In the age of anthropocentric humanism that followed the Renaissance and the Reformation we have la tragédie de Dieu [Integral Humanism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 32]: “in the first moment of the humanist dialectic, God becomes the guarantor of the domination of man over matter. It is the Cartesian God” (33). See also his judgments about Malebranche’s and Leibniz’s theodicies (33–4). The Christian philosophy of the 1600s is the first moment of the humanist dialectic. It is the first moment, that is, of a crisis that will reach its conclusion in absolute immanentism. Its development is nothing else but the development of a crisis (which is exactly the opposite point of view from the one I advanced in the 6th essay). Even though Maritain does not explicitly use the word “bourgeois,” it is clear how, via the idea of the “guarantor God,” the expression “first moment of the humanist dialectic” can be easily translated into “first moment of bourgeois rationalism.”

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Then one cannot escape the consequences: once this set of interconnected theses is accepted, the Christian metaphysics of the baroque age and liberalism become moments in the formation of the bourgeoisie; and once this classist concept is introduced, it becomes impossible to contain it. Socialism constitutes a higher stance than liberalism, in the sense I said before. But, in this way, the transition from the reactionary to the democratic position has the effect, within Maritain’s historical perspective, of transcribing in some fashion the Marxist vision of modern history into Thomism. And it is natural that it does not happen otherwise, if we consider the pure reactionary position as it appears, for instance, in Donoso Cortès: supposedly, liberalism and socialism are successive moments in the development of the same essence, which can well be defined by the term “perfectism,” but socialism represent the final and worst outcome. Therefore, the inversion of the reactionary scheme cannot but imply a preference for the kernel of truth contained in socialism over that of liberalism. There is also a deeper reason. We must not forget that the adversary against which neo-Thomism formed, among Christian philosophies, is Ontologism: therefore, the Christian metaphysics of the baroque age, in the Cartesian form, must appear to it as pure decadence and not as an answer, albeit inadequate, to new problems (namely, the rise of atheism) that St Thomas had ignored simply because every philosopher cannot but think within a particular historical situation and against particular adversaries. In Maritain’s position the introduction, albeit as a watermark, of the classist theory does not take place without a contradiction because, conversely, he also affirms that atheism is the first fundamental premise of all of Marxism and, thus, also of the classist thesis. He perceived this contradiction, but without being able to really escape it; the consequence was his undeniable decline after Integral Humanism, which therefore remains his essential work. Not having moved any further explains the decline of his fortunes, at least in Europe, both among those Catholics who are keenest to highlight the priority of the value of socialism compared to liberism, and, of course, among their adversaries.17 He perceived it, and, in fact, overcoming it was what prompted 17 The close resemblance between the fortune of Croce and that of Maritain deserves our attention. The former, who had been seen in the 1930s as the teacher of secular anti-Fascism, and had been thought to be the beginner of a new Enlightenment,

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him to formulate, and endlessly repeat, his only new thesis after 1934 – that about the nature of atheism. If we consider the long chapter he devoted to Marx in Moral Philosophy, we easily realize that he thought this work in relation to Marxism, and to have a criterion to judge it. I already said that, for him, atheism is, as an attitude, a demand for freedom – the affirmation that man is the only master of his own destiny, freed from every alienation and every heteronomy, independent of an ultimate end and every eternal law. But this demand faces a contradiction when atheism is formulated as a doctrine: because its revolt transforms truth, justice, good, and evil into forces originated by the process of history. An atheist replaces submission to God with self-immolation to the “sacred voracity of becoming,” a “pure mystical love” for the new image of the false God – History. His break with the false “God of idolaters” is less radical than that of the saint; an atheist is a “saint manqué.” Throughout this entire book I have shown that, in this fashion, one does not at all grasp the nature of atheism and, consequently, one fails to adequately place Marxism in the history of philosophy. The chapter in Moral Philosophy is a confirmation of this. According to Maritain, Marx’s work can be explained in terms of a moral reaction against the “prince of false gods,” Hegel’s God mistaken for God. Because of this confusion Marx remained a prisoner of Hegelianism: “The obligation to be in connivance with history is just as strong, as total, as fundamental for Marx as for Hegel. It is difficult for the observer who is determined to maintain the freedom of the critical mind not to conclude from this that in the last analysis Marx was vanquished by the false God of Hegel.”18 Seduced by Hegelianism, Marx was not even able to confess the moralism without which his work defies explanation, and which made him take the side of the slave in Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic19 (this is so hardly true that Marx never refers to this passage of the Phenomenology, and there is no proof that it had the least influence on his thought); there is a contradiction between the ethics he lived and

was abandoned by the subsequent neo-Enlightenment. The latter, who had been seen in those years as the teacher of Catholic anti-Fascism, had to be abandoned by the Catholic left for symmetric reasons. Consider also the peculiar affinity in the spiritual physiognomies of Mounier and Gobetti, who was the real initiator, ante litteram, of Italian neo-Enlightenment thought. 18 Maritain, Moral Philosophy, 233. 19 Ibid., 242.

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the ethics he formulated. Given this, it is really not surprising that all the types of Marxist criticism that I criticized in the Introduction come back in Maritain’s pages. Thus, regarding the relationship between the atheism of Feuerbach and that of Marx, he subscribes to De Lubac’s thesis; thus, he interprets the religious character of Marxist thought as the unconscious permanence of ideas that were originally Christian (“the latest Christian heresy, the atheist faith of Marxism, is precisely the only faith in which a real vestige of Christianity has found and could ever find a rational systematization in terms of the Hegelian dialectic”),20 missing entirely its specific features; thus, he must talk about an unconscious iusnaturalism.21 Therefore, there is a contradiction between moralism and historicism; Marx’s work is directed against Hegel, and yet is a captive of Hegelianism. In this way Marxism is not placed in history at all because, on the contrary, it is a reaffirmation of Hegelianism against its critics. We are not surprised, therefore, that the subsequent chapters of the book become a sequence of portraits without a real internal connection, devoted to Comte, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Dewey, and Bergson; since the place of Marxism in the history of philosophy escaped Maritain, it becomes impossible for him to take into consideration its claim of having already surpassed the philosophies that followed it in time. For Maritain, too, the critique of Marxism as a philosophy reduces to a critique of Hegel. Now, what Marx’s emotional reaction might have been (whether it was genuinely moral, in the traditional sense, as an unaware invocation of “Natural Law Avenged,” or whether, instead, in him hate prevailed over love, as Mazzini thought) is a question that not only is difficult to answer but above all is of very little importance. What matters, instead, is his work – that is, the capture of socialism by Hegelianism (the greatest bargain, one would be inclined to say, the Hegelian school ever made) and the loss, in this capture, of its ethical character. This raises the question, which is seldom discussed, as to why socialism and rationalism carried to the ultimate consequences have a similar nature; and the other question, about Maritain, as to whether his position is obligatory within the historiographic perspective that follows from the neoThomist commentary on St Thomas.

20 Ibid., 243; see also 241. 21 Maritain, Moral Philosophy, 256.

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IX. In fact, it is certainly not coincidental that other thinkers who moved in this direction, of affirming the superiority of the socialist stance over the liberal, have abandoned Thomism and embraced the French trend of Pascalianism separated from Jansenism; meaning a position that, while maintaining all of Pascal’s condemnations of previous positions of Christian thought, adds to them the condemnation of Jansenism as well; and presents itself as “biblical” thought in Pascalian fashion but completely inverting Pascal. Or else they have set St Thomas’s example – as the Christian philosopher who baptized Aristotelianism, which at that time was the war machine of the adversaries of Christianity – against his doctrine, viewed in its standard scholastic exposition. Supposedly, today being truly Thomists means fulfilling the same task with respect to evolutionism and Marxism. Indeed, I mentioned the perfectly consistent and unitary character of Marxist thought. As a consequence, once one of its theses is accepted, one must reach the ultimate consequences; and this is what is happening in a large part not only of today’s Catholic culture but also of Catholic opinion. Do we not constantly hear people say that Christianity must abandon the morality of Order in favour of that of Progress, the morality of the individual in favour of that of collective humanity, because the only certainty left is that ethics cannot be defined in any other way than as participation in the march of progress; that progress has the right to swipe away its opponents, that the only sin is immobility, pessimism, and so on; that today there is a change in the human condition whereby we are entering the socialization phase; that all philosophies, except Marxism and evolutionism, belong to a pre-Galileian stage; that what is defective is not the principle of totalization but the imperfect way in which it has been applied; that the true opposition is not between producers and profiteers but between progressives and regressives (by saying which people would like to move beyond Marxism, as if Marxism today did not prefer such narrative to that about classes, which is rather more embarrassing);22 and so on. Thus, in the end the judgment that the socialist exigence takes priority over the liberal leads to modernist attempts to subsume the “modern” 22 By saying this I do not want to make any pronouncement on the thought of Fr Teilhard de Chardin, which is not so easy to understand. I will only make a brief comment about his opposition to Pascal: we must acknowledge that today Pascal’s thought is enormously important from the philosophical standpoint but has lost its grip from

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into Christianity, which have the inevitable outcome of modernisms – namely, subsuming Christianity into the modern, in the secular sense, and in this case precisely in the Marxist sense. But what is worth pointing out is that the morality of the “direction of history” presupposes the Marxist reduction of man to the ensemble of social relations and is, under such presupposition, quite valid; as is also valid within the pantheistic position that affirms a God immanent to humanity, who grows together with it. It becomes completely meaningless when one admits the reality of the individual, both when one affirms it in a position of autonomous morality (because in what sense can the course of history be a principle of ethical obligation?) and when one affirms it in a transcendent theological position because, if the course of history has been arbitrarily fixed by God, and could have been different, there is no reason why man is morally obliged to abide by it: from a relationship of force one cannot derive a moral relationship. We can feel that we are God’s cooperators in history only in as much as this cooperation appears to us to be imposed by a morality of Order, even though its rigorous meaning is not easily defined. Under the hypothesis of God’s transcendence, no obligation can derive from a mere consideration of the historical process, even if we were able to decipher its direction inductively with a high degree of confidence.23 It is undeniable that, with respect to the ethics of history, an evolutionist and a Marxist find themselves in a morally better situation.

2. Free Will and Political Freedom X. At first sight they seem to be entirely distinct questions. To my knowledge, an investigation that highlights the unbreakable link between the affirmation of free will and the positive value that exists in liberalism,24 the apologetic one. Striving to make up for this insufficiency might be considered Teilhard’s positivity. But I am not going to tackle this question now; I only intend to refer to the current form of Teilhardism. 23 Therefore, Maritain wrote very well when he said: “We are not the cooperators of history, we are the cooperators of God,” in Pour une philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: ed. du Seul, 1959), 72. 24 Regarding the problem of free will, I view as decisive the results reached by the philosopher-through-history who has best studied this doctrine in its classical authors (St Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche), Jean Laporte, in his book La conscience de la liberté (Paris: Flammarion, 1947). He decisively dispatches all the criticisms that have

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and that, conversely, shows that the loss of the idea of free will is one of the fundamental elements of the contemporary crisis, is still lacking, and would seem to me to be exceptionally important. You may object that it is lacking because it must be lacking. Indeed, it is a common opinion that the problem of political freedom is altogether different from that of freedom in its traditional terms and solutions – free will, determinism, unity of freedom, and necessity – and must be treated with entirely different methods lest we fall into those philosophical-political hybrids that are the delights, many times too easy delights, of the analysts of language. The problem of free will, people think, is about man’s freedom with respect to God or with respect to nature, whether or not it is amenable to being solved; conversely, the problem of political freedom is about “freedom in the city” and, therefore, about freedom with respect to other men; it is the problem of the means that can be used to defend man from the oppression he can suffer not so much from the state, in its impersonal nature, as from other men, those who hold power. In short, the freedom political philosophers talk about is freedom from servitude, which is something other than the freedom from necessity, which is the topic of discussion of metaphysical philosophers. Nor does the principle of political freedom require, as a foundation, any metaphysics: it will be justified or unjustified based on purely pragmatic considerations – the considerations that demonstrate the catastrophic character of political mysticisms. People add that the quest for metaphysical foundations is what prevents effective liberalism because it leads to seeing, or at least to auguring, the state as the guardian of the metaphysics that guarantees “true” freedom. This opinion, upon closer inspection, is much less persuasive that it may seem. First of all, it is not at all as philosophically neutral as it claims to be: on the contrary, it contains the affirmation that political freedom

been made against free will, and he does this in a study that wants to clarify what pure experience can tell us in the field of metaphysics; and which, therefore, goes to show that criticisms of free will have an entirely different origin than a consideration of experience. He rightly observes that the problem of free will is “the philosophical problem par excellence, because it directs the theory of knowledge, morals and every concept we may form of the human person and its relationship with God” (6). I perfectly share this judgment, and I add that we meet again the problem of free will at the bottom of the problem of ethico-political freedom itself.

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is tightly linked to philosophical empiricism, understood as a position of thought founded on the distinction between the verifiable and the unverifiable, and on the assertion that human life, as knowledge as well as morality and politics, can organize itself on the terrain of the verifiable, independently of the opinions, which are necessarily subjective, that we may have about what is not empirically verifiable. At the end of the day, according to this opinion, liberalism is inseparable from the empiricist cultural climate, as a moderate form of rationalism that allows the certainty of valid knowledge without claiming to exhaust reality. This is in contrast both to dogmatic rationalism and to irrationalism and skepticism, positions that are all tied in various ways to authoritarian solutions. It is also inseparable from the Enlightenment, which saw in freedom the “not hindering,” in contrast to Romanticism, which saw its creativity. Now, it seems to me that, from the idea of freedom as “not hindering,” without any ulterior specification beside the fact that subjects have to coexist, one can only derive … precisely what historically derived from it: namely, the form of liberalism that has presented itself as atomistic individualism and as naturalism, as faith in the goodness of the laws of nature, which supposedly will bring different interests into harmony – that is, liberalism so welded to economic liberism that it looks like a superstructure of it. Nor is this the only element in which we can recognize how the opinion I just described, which is usually more theorized than lived, gives way to the theses of historical materialism: because from the idea that the problem of political freedom is different from that of metaphysical freedom one moves easily, at least psychologically, to the idea that the various metaphysical positions on the theme of freedom are nothing but projections of different social and historical situations; to the idea that historical materialism, accepted as a method and not generalized to a total conception of reality, is able to explain metaphysical positions. XI. The lack of attention to the link between the problem of free will and that of liberalism reflects, essentially, the permanence of cultural habits that predate the First World War. Because at that time the antithesis with respect to which the ideal of freedom was affirmed was what remained of the Middle Ages or of the absolutist states, viewed as guardians of a transcendent truth. As a consequence of this, the tradition of the classics of freedom was identified with the champions of free spirit

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and of reason’s struggle against ancestral myths and prejudices and thus, generally speaking, precisely with the foes of free will. This is why, for instance, people recognized a teacher of liberalism in Spinoza, who proved in the Theological-political Treatise that libertatem philosophandi … nisi cum pace reipublicae ipsaque pietate, tolli non posse. Therefore we understand why the 1800s were the century in which the libertas minor of free will was most sacrificed in favour of what was traditionally called libertas maior. Today, on the contrary, the problem is that of defending the ideal of freedom within democracy accepted as an irreversible historical fact; the ideal of freedom as declaration of the primacy of conscience, with respect to any external power of a minority or a majority. This presupposes affirming the thesis – which has been the object of much reflection but is not very common in current opinion – that freedom and democracy are not identical at all. Certainly, the exigence of freedom also implies that of democracy as a consequent and subordinate value: there can be no full realization of the moral ideal of freedom except in a regime, and in an international community, in which every single individual is also able to regard himself as an end of the entire social process. But the two values cannot be put on the same level, nor can one say that the ideal of democracy includes in itself, surpassing it, that of freedom. What now must be seen is how the problem of defending freedom against the possible totalitarian involutions of democracy involves picking up anew the problem of libertas minor.25 XII. Therefore, the question to ask is whether the reaffirmation of liberalism today requires again picking up a concept, like free will, that certainly belongs to “theological philosophy.” I have already recalled that decisive passage by Descartes: Tria mirabilia fecit Deus: res ex nihilo, liberum arbitrium et Hominem Deum.26 It raises the theoretical question 25 The fact that Dostoevsky felt that this reconsideration is crucial to addressing the new questions posed by atheism is well known. But the almost unknown philosopher who, before him, tried to base an entire reform of philosophy, in all its parts, including moral and political applications, on a deeper understanding of the idea of free will as the first and fundamental truth, unrecognized by all philosophers and affirmed by one tradition only, that of the Catholic Church, deserves to be remembered: Jules Lequier was the thinker who at that time saw best the connection between the idea of free will and the truth of liberalism. 26 ”Cogitationes privatae,” in Ovres de Descartes, t. 10 Adam and Tannery eds. (Paris: Cerf, 1908), 218.

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of the connection between the thesis of free will and those of creation and miracle; and also the historical question, which is extremely important, as to whether the negation of divine creation and miracles, tied to the rationalist hatred of finite individuality, was always the motivation for the sophistic reasons adduced to deny the experience of free will. Whereas today many people think, as I said, that the time has come to claim evolutionism for Christianity, in a particular form in which it means (in its transposition to the political and social field) the total negation of liberal man, I think instead that it is the time to claim for it the modern world’s greatest truth – liberalism in its ethical sense. But what is most surprising is that what leads us to pose the problem of the relationship between free will and ethical-political freedom is nothing other than the critical consideration of Croce’s formulation of liberalism. In fact, in Croce’s political philosophy we find three contradictory aspects. First of all, the rigorous exigency – which is a consequence of the “stronger and stronger obsession” with historical materialism as the principal adversary27 – to dissociate liberalism from perfectism and from radicalism (i.e., from all the motifs that lead to revolutionary thought). Then, in complete contradiction, the very real, albeit kept in check, presence of all the motifs of the totalitarian position, which is necessarily consequent upon Hegelian historicism. Finally, what does the job of keeping them in check: a conservatorism that contradicts both his historicism – or at least the logic of historicism – and the exigency of separating liberalism from perfectism, which is nonetheless the only element that enables him to avoid the totalitarian outcome. In connection with this, the three judgments that have been made about his political theory can be explained. The first – which by now is pronounced by very few people – views him as the thinker who elaborated, in definitive form, the complete theory of liberalism. This judgment was common in secular intellectual milieux in the 1930s, when the anti-clericalism of History of Europe seemed to justify the idea that he had embraced the tradition of the Enlightenment; but then people realized that it was not so, that anti-radicalism was still one of his essential themes, that he loathed the Enlightenment-inspired Partito d’Azione and

27 A. Gramsci, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin: Einaudi, 1948), 206.

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so on. The second judgment was that his liberalism had been, at most, a matter of sensitivity and temperament, but that actually his thought, much more than Gentile’s, had contributed to the formation of the totalitarian and Fascist mindset. This judgment was then amenable to various versions, spiritualist or Marxist. The third judgment sees in him – because of his teachers, Marx, Machiavelli, Sorel, Treitschke; because of his aversion to iusnaturalism, to the Enlightenment, to the mentality of the eighteenth century, to the English empiricist tradition; because of his anti-democratism; because of his traditionalism; because of his references to the thought of the Restoration (and, among authentically liberal authors, essentially only to Constant, whom he views, however, almost exclusively in his anti-Jacobin aspect rather than in his aspect as a theoretician of the limits of power); because of his neglect of the juridical institutions in which liberalism becomes concrete – “more than a theoretician of liberalism … the man who inspired the resistance to oppression.” And this because, at bottom, the political problem had never really deeply interested him.28 I confess that I disagree with all three judgments. I see in Croce first of all a political philosopher because I think – and on this point I subscribe fully to Gramsci’s thesis – that his essential and constant adversary was Marx, his first teacher from whom he had moved away. By reason of this adversary he was, so to speak, obligatorily bound to become the most complete theoretician of liberalism within secularism. But to these two judgments I add that his formulation also marks the end of the secular foundation of liberalism. The investigation (and I apologize for being able to sketch its outline only schematically) should include the following moments. First of all, a full development of the theme “what

28 This thesis is expressed most rigorously in Norberto Bobbio’s two essays “Croce e la politica della cultura” and “Benedetto Croce e il liberalismo” (in Politica e Cultura [Turin: Einaudi, 1955]). It is curious that Bobbio, even though he mostly leans towards linking liberalism to the Enlightenment and to empiricism, occasionally swings towards its religious foundation: “The liberal spirit was born from religious and theological conceptions such as those of Calvinism, and so far nobody has found a better argument against the dominance of the state than the absolute value of the person” (ibid., 267).

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Marx owes to the counter-revolution.”29 A critic of Marxism cannot be reactionary because the reactionary themes were already assimilated by Marxism. Thus, Croce is liberal, even before he declares or recognizes himself as such, but since his is liberalism after Marxism, what happens is that the Marxist counter-revolutionary themes (anti-iusnaturalism, etc.) are absorbed by him into liberalism until it becomes completely dissociated from radicalism. His thought process cannot but repeat that of Hegel, in the sense of a reconciliation with historical reality, but this time with the liberal reality of 1900 to 1915; and this in the form of giolittismo,30 that is, of the greatest foe of “political philosophy” (and, mind you, this does not happen by chance: because Croce’s reconciliation with reality implied a complete break with revolutionary thought, and there is no revolutionary thought without “political philosophy”).31 The theoretical formulation of such liberalism is, therefore, the “philosophy of distincts.” Such development of a non-Enlightenment-based form of liberalism reaches its conclusion in the critique of the theodicy that justified the indissoluble marriage of liberalism and liberism. However, because of Croce’s immanentism, after this sequence of negations liberalism can only find its philosophy in a form of historicism opposed to the Enlightenment and, thus, in a form of Hegelianism separated from what could lead to Marxism. Because of this historicism, pre-totalitarian motifs make their appearance in Croce, and they are linked expressly with the negation of free will. The essential point of Croce’s pre-totalitarianism lies in the affirmation that the concepts of free will and responsibility have meaning only from a practical and energetical point of view – that is, the theoretical point of view (of truth) is always justificatory. And saying that the concept of responsibility belongs to the practical sphere means that we are not responsible, but we are made responsible in connection with some practical task – that is, 29 Some initial suggestions on how to treat this topic can be found in Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 191ff [from a new chapter not included in Sociology of Communism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), the English translation of the 1st edition]. 30 [TN] Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928) was prime minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921. He was known for his pragmatic and unprincipled approach to politics, which gave rise to the term giolittismo. 31 Bobbio points out correctly (Politica e Cultura, 211) that Croce’s reflections on liberalism start with a short note in La critica 21 from the early months of 1923, titled “Contro la troppa filosofia politica.”

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we are made responsible by the process of history.32 Certainly I have no intention of claiming that every negation of free will leads necessarily to totalitarianism; I say, instead, that in historicism the principle of attributed responsibility is the true ideal foundation of totalitarianism, which distinguishes itself from all other authoritarian and dictatorial forms precisely because of this foundation. Indeed, let us consider other texts by Croce. Freedom, being unconstrained from any transcendent norm, as the principle and unique subject of history, must be viewed by him as creativity, without further specifications: “the awareness of being free and the will to be free is nothing else but the prod to continuously increase life”; “the purpose of morality is to promote life”; “long live those who create life!”; “we ought to get rid of a judgment which is doctrinally and logically incorrect: namely, that freedom meets its boundaries again and again in moral law or conscience. But moral law or conscience commands to be free and defines itself through freedom; so that it cannot set boundaries to freedom or, using a different word, to morality.”33 Now, from such “creativity” one cannot in any way deduce respect for the single individual. Did not the famous “cosmichistorical individuals” always legitimate their right to destroy precisely on the basis of this creativity? And how else can today’s totalitarianism – which is something else entirely than the cosmic-historical individuals of the past – justify its harshness? But the anti-revolutionary motif kicks in, and then, “leaving aside the scruples about the possibility of justifying a political theory with a philosophical theory,”34 Croce strives to identify liberalism and historicism. The only formula he can find, after liberalism has been dissociated from the idea of the person, must be that of history as history of freedom. Now, I do not think that the common objection has merit: namely, that, from the idea of freedom as the “subject of history” and its creative force, the essence of historical change, one cannot deduce the political theory of liberalism because the latter has in mind freedom in time,

32 See the essay “La grazia e il libero arbitrio” (1929, in Ultimi saggi [Bari: Laterza, 1935], 290–5); and, among the “Frammenti di etica,” composed between 1915 and 1920, see the one on “Responsabilità” (reprinted in Etica e politica [Bari: Laterza, 1945], 125–8). 33 Benedetto Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1938), 244, 42, 238. 34 Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 229.

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freedom under threat, freedom that has value to the extent that it can be lost; that one cannot deduce it because, from the Spirit, conceived theologically as the mono-agonist of history, one cannot deduce any political position, the most tyrannical regimes being instruments of its realization as much as the freest. Indeed, according to Croce, in the 1800s thought came to understand history as “history of freedom.” Those who have reached this awareness cannot but reject the theocratic, the absolutist, the democratic, and the Communist ideals; nor can they feel tempted by morbid Romanticism, the father of decadentism and grandfather of recent political activism. From the idea of history as history of freedom follows a concrete practical ideal that, however, is only depicted via negations. Now, the negative way in which liberalism is reached as an effective political position rules out the possibility of presenting it as an ideal that promotes the advent of something new; instead, this ideal becomes identified with a historical reality under threat, which must be preserved against returns of the past and dangers of the present. The gap between the meta-political theory of freedom and liberalism-in-time is overcome only by absorbing into the meta-political principle of freedom an empirical content and an already realized reality. Namely, the so-called liberal age from 1870 to 1914, which he elevates to a model of history, in the sense that every improvement must take place within the horizon of its values. There is a perfect correspondence between his philosophy of distincts and this historical epoch, which can only be described expressly as the age of distincts. But does this not mirror exactly the conclusion and exhaustion of history and philosophy in Hegel, even if Croce replaced direct apologetics by indirect apologetics? The historicist sublation of Hegel did not take place because the “non-definitiveness of truth” in thought was just a cover to assert the definitiveness of a determined historical reality, which, in turn, could not find awareness of itself except in this theoretical affirmation of non-definitiveness. Moreover, his philosophy concludes in a “utopia of the past,” even though this past is close, the world of yesterday; but it is close in the sense of purely temporal closeness because, as I already explained, from the standpoint of the relation between spiritual and political life no historical period is further away from the present. By being forced to elevate the empirical into the meta-political, Croce has run into a grating contradiction with his own historicism, whose strength supposedly lies “in the proof that ideas

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or values, which have been assumed as models and benchmarks in history, are not universal ideas and values, but particular and historical facts themselves, maladroitly elevated to universals.”35 The transition from expounding his philosophy in the form of philosophy of distincts to expounding it in the form of philosophy of freedom clarifies that his attachment to a particular historical period is not merely a political and practical fact (as, for example, his neutralism at the time of the First World War might appear to be) but, rather, is related to his philosophy as a necessary consequence. The contradictory nature of the quest to find the foundation of nonperfectist liberalism in radical immanentism, which is tied to the dissolution of the personality and substantiality of the individual, thus raises the question of its connection with the idea of free will.36

35 Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione, 51. 36 [Note added in 1970] What is the author’s position vis-à-vis Maritain, after the publication of The Peasant of the Garonne? Kindly be aware that he still maintains what he wrote because his intention was not to fight against the thought of the man whom he recognized since his early youth as one of his most secure guides but to continue what he regards as his authentic aspect, freeing it from the elements that prevent it from fully resisting the neo-modernist position. The Peasant of the Garonne, which clarifies the true sense of Integral Humanism, shows the authentic intention of Maritain’s thought, confirming in full the author’s view of this book. Nonetheless, he thinks that Maritain’s position, in order to become truly adequate to his purpose, must be completed with a critique of the ordinary vision of the history of modern philosophy; something Maritain did not do, and could not have done, because he did not consider the continuation of religious Cartesianism in Italian thought from Vico to Rosmini. The development “from Descartes to Rosmini,” and the conjunction of Rosmini’s deepest aspect with the most authentic sense of the best Christian philosophical tradition, remained unknown to him, just as did, in point of fact, the Italian tradition.

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Conclusion

Let us consider the thesis I stated on page 1. Has it been proven? Also: after this first chapter on the problem of atheism has been written, what further investigation is necessary? One may deplore the apparent disorder of this book. Indeed, from both the logic and the didactic standpoint a different criterion would have seemed appropriate: start from the definitions of atheism, critique them, and so on. Nonetheless, presenting the essays in the temporal order in which they had appeared seemed to me a better counsel in order to communicate with the reader through an experience that started at the ethicalpolitical level and that led me to run into a number of philosophical problems. Pages 205–7 are clearly autobiographic: they describe the anti-Fascist experience as it presented itself at the purely moral level to a young intellectual who, between the years 1935 and 1940, had no ties whatsoever to pre-existing political positions, and who opposed the Idealist culture that was dominant at that time;1 his temptation and dissatisfaction, simultaneously, vis-à-vis both the philosophies of existence 1 At that time this experience was shared only by few; but I think that those few, upon reading these pages, will recognize themselves in them. But my isolation was especially hard because then I was also separated, albeit within relationships of personal friendship, from the broadly Idealist culture in which the anti-Fascist youth of that period sought its ideal foundation. Conversely, this feature united me to Ludovico Geymonat, even though, starting from a common moral experience, we moved in very different directions. I was also separated from the very large majority of young Catholics of that epoch, who, with full loyalty, at that time focused rather on the conciliatory aspect of Fascism, or regarded it as a force that certainly was irrational but that nonetheless prepared the way for a Catholic renaissance by dissolving liberalism and

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and forms of religious dualism; his encounter with Marxism, due to the political tension within this moral experience, and his attempt to reconcile it with Christianity; the break, which was first of all ethical, with Marxism and the affirmation that atheism is its essential principle, which conditions the entire process of its practice.2 Then new problems arose: how to go from the critique of the position that in rigorous terms should be called neo-modernist – because neo-modernism is the final figure in the line of thought that intends to surpass Marxism through a quest, conceived incorrectly, to welcome its ideal and practical truths – to the critique of Marxism itself? Its criterion of truth is located in history – namely, in the irreversible relationship of integrating-and-surpassing that it has with other forms of philosophical and religious thought; therefore, the question must focus on its claim of being the endpoint, not of philosophy in general, but of philosophy so far, of representing the truth of the current historical epoch; hence the need to focus the investigation on the origins of modern philosophy, such as they must socialism. That mindset, in young Catholics, changed after 1940: and then my experience coincided with that of Felice Balbo and that of Franco Rodano, even though its outcome, at least for a few years, was different from theirs. 2 The relationship between ethics and politics in Marxism highlights its complete negation of the idea of participation, which is the foundation, even as it is amenable to being understood in different ways, of Christian thought. It is also based on this negation that we can understand the meaning of “Marxist materialism.” Many authors have wondered: Why the word “materialism” if it is an entirely distinct position from usual materialism? Does not materialism in Marx stand for “humanism” against Hegelian “Idealism,” or for gnoseological realism? For example, G.A. Wetter writes: “The reality just described, which elevates itself ever higher, and ultimately even into spiritual forms of existence, is regarded, for reasons which are not rationally intelligible and may well be explicable only on psychological grounds, as essentially ‘material’ in character” in Le matérialisme dialectique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), 585 [TN: Dialectical Materialism, trans. P. Heath (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 550–1]. I think, on the contrary, that the meaning of Marxist materialism, as the most radical and authentic form of materialism, can be grasped by a negative route when one develops all the implications of the negation, carried to the extreme limit, of the idea of participation. The question is exceptionally important since the idea of participation also marks the link between Greek thought and Christian thought. You see, therefore, how superficial is the reasoning of those who think that the Christian adoption of the forms of Greek thought is contingent (affirming that other positions of thought could be Christianized just as easily) or who even view it as the defect that Christian thought has to rid itself of.

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appear to us after existentialism and Marxism.3 The rediscovery, in the course of this investigation, of a continuous line of development from Descartes to Vico, as a consequence of the insertion into the history of philosophy of a serious consideration of the atheistic position, and the question about the possibility of a reaffirmation of liberalism – but liberalism such as it can be conceived after Kierkegaard (“the individual is more than the species”) and Dostoevsky4 – are evidently connected with the experience I mentioned. If the book is not “organic” in the academic sense, the experience from which it was born is. The purpose of the opening essay is to clarify some aspects of this experience and, above all, to define the sequence of problems to which those discussed are tied, as topics whose consideration is indispensable in order to understand contemporary history as well as contemporary philosophy;5 this because the former has the character of being novel, by virtue of being a philosophical history, which is simultaneously history of the expansion of atheism, history of the appearance of a new form of mythologism as the unexpected conclusion produced by rationalism,6 history of the process towards nihilism – “l’enfouissement 3 The repercussion of the philosophy of existence has been a focus on the antiSpinozian aspect of Cartesianism and the acknowledgment of its rigorous and critical significance. The repercussion of Marxism, according to my interpretation, has been the definition of the overarching structure that joins together the philosophies of Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche, to the illustration of which I devoted, in this book, the essay “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism.” The repercussion of the critique of Marxism has been the analogy between the problem faced by today’s Catholic thought (to show the correlation between the negation of God and the negation of man) and that faced by the theological and philosophical thought of the Catholic Reformation (to show the correlation between the negation of man and the negation of God) (see my work “La crisi del Molinismo in Descartes,” Archivio di filosofia [1956]). 4 It was precisely Dostoevsky, and the fundamental book that Berdaev devoted to his thought, that prompted Piovani to study La teodicea sociale del Rosmini (Padua: Cedam, 1957) – as explained in the beautiful introduction – which is one of the best philosophical works to have appeared in Italy since the war. 5 Regarding this sequence of problems, I generally had to limit myself to initial sketches of their new formulation in light of the definition of atheism that I proposed; in turn, this definition can be fully verified only if such formulations can be proven. Thus, studying them in specific works is for me a necessary task. 6 When we talk about mythologism in reference to today’s world, we must not think at all of primitive myths, nor must we think of the romantic conceptions of myth, and not even, strange as it may seem, of the theory of myth that results from Sorel’s erosion of French utopian socialism through Marxist socialism, and which in effect

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dans l’animalité” as it has been correctly written – and history that is for the first time truly worldwide. Compared to this history’s novelty, contemporary philosophy might seem to be the mere reiteration of forms that had already taken shape in the previous period (phenomenology itself rose during the period between 1870 and 1914). However, this phenomenon must not be interpreted as a decline in originality; the reason for it is that what characterizes the present moment is that the various philosophies are being tested by a history that has in philosophy its genetic process. Do they have in themselves the “virtuality” to reform in order to face the new history and to give an answer to its “crisis,” which so far is unresolved? I will now try to formulate most concisely, and without fear of repetition, the essential theses I have reached: 1) The vast majority of the forms of religious thought that have come to the fore after the Second World War are underpinned and characterized by the idea – no matter whether it is explicitly affirmed of

stops at a consideration of the irrational aspect of politics. Instead, we must think of such a conception of myth that, because it comes after rationalism, eliminates entirely the distinction between truth and falsehood. This happens when thought about being is measured only by its practical power and is thus reduced to an instrument of the will to power. I have already said, proposing it as a research topic, that this position starts, unaware, within Marxism, in Lenin’s thought. Hence the crucial importance of two problems: (1) the relationship Lenin-Gentile, as the two contradictory ultimate positions in which Hegelianism concludes. They both affirm the unity of theory and practice; but in the first the point of view of theory completely loses its autonomy and is absorbed into practice; in the second there is an effective primacy of theory, which deprives philosophy of any direct impact on the becoming of the world; (2) the relationship Gentile-Mussolini, which makes manifest this broken connection in the sense of philosophy’s lack of practical efficacy: Actualism cannot pretend to maintain the unity of theory and practice, except through an alliance with a mythical position, subordinate to the Marxist-Leninist one. Among the very few who have correctly framed the problem of myth in the contemporary world, we must remember P.-L. Landsberg, a pupil of Scheler and the conduit between Scheler’s personalism and that of the group of Esprit, of which he was unquestionably the most philosophical thinker. His work, which was just sketched, but from which one can get profound suggestions, has been published in the posthumous volume Problèmes du personnalisme (Paris: du Seuil, 1952). Unfortunately, Landsberg, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, was not able to continue it.

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not – of “purifying atheism.”7 That is, atheism is essentially defined as the “discovery of evil” and the revolt against it in the name of “morality” and, thus, as the destruction of philosophical idols, of God understood as soul of the world, as natura naturans, as transcendental subject, as the spirit of history, as eternal axiom, as constitutive reason. This destruction is such that it makes it impossible to reaffirm religious thought as pantheism, cosmologism, justifying theodicy; it is the lucid recognition of the reality of evil (hence its work of demystifying optimism, Idealism, etc.), followed by the replacement, in its regard, of the justificatory attitude – in which one goes on to consider the harmony of totality – by the agonistic one. Therefore, religious thought will be true to the extent that it “assumes” atheism’s truth; it can do so because the moral revolt that defines atheism can only be motivated by the presence of the idea that God is inseparably being and value. Mere rejection would lead to the cosmologism of manualistic scholastics, characterized by isolating pure being and by the vain attempt to deduce, out of this abstraction, value. In short, atheism allegedly represents the stage of the “death of God,” which is a prelude to that of his Resurrection. Therefore, it can be viewed and lived by the Christian as a moment of negative theology. This thesis is seldom affirmed explicitly, but it is nonetheless clearly visible under the cover of precautionary formulations. For example, Jean Lacroix writes: “The great merit of contemporary atheism is that it has achieved a scouring out of the human intellect by abolishing all idolatry. It does not turn man into a God, but fully accepts his humanity, and will answer for it. Never before has the human predicament been seen so clearly … Never before has the absolute been so utterly excluded … Man is not God; this is not the whole truth, but it is the first and most indispensable … [atheism is] a radical critique of all human absolutes.”8 7 This is the title of a chapter in the brief, but tight and juicy, essay by Étienne Borne, Le problème du mal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960). Even though I disagree completely with his thesis about atheism, I would like to highlight the very insightful remarks that Borne makes about the pari and the ontological argument (104–8). 8 Jean Lacroix, Le sens de l’athéisme moderne (Paris: Casterman, 1961), 64–5 [TN: The Meaning of Modern Atheism, trans. G. Barden (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 62–3]. This book carries to the extreme consequences, within the line of the personalism of Esprit, the thesis I am fighting against.

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The language in which this thesis is formulated is very often Pascalian; but actually it originates not from Pascal but from Bergson, and one should highlight the necessary attenuation of the meaning of the initial fall to which it is liable, which derives expressly from Bergson. This attenuation reaches its highest degree, I am not sure in Teilhard but certainly in Teilhardism. 2) I must emphasize the novelty of this thesis with respect to what was, until very recently, the traditional thesis in religious thought, which affirmed that atheism must necessarily transition into other illusory and mythical forms of religion (religion of humanity etc.). This was said to be a vital necessity because of the unlivability of radical atheism: when it wants to give up building up surrogates for God, it must lead to psychological dissolution (e.g., Kirillov in Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche).9 Thus, the idea that atheism builds up idols is replaced by the idea that it is first of all a criticism of idols. How could this new interpretation come about? We will not step outside of philosophy if we seek its roots in a certain interpretation of contemporary history, which took shape in the 1930s and is still dominant. We know that interest in Marxist thought disappeared almost completely from European culture in the 1920s, and it was broadly rediscovered only during the war, and above all in the period immediately afterwards. Thus, in the years after 1930, an interpretation of the crisis was formed that entirely overlooks, if not the political reality of Communism, at least Marx’s philosophy. Consequently, a typically Eurocentric vision occurred just as history was becoming worldwide; Communism is Russian history, people said, to be considered in light of that country’s process of Westernization and industrialization. As a corollary, since nobody could fail to notice that contemporary history was new – in the sense that it could not be viewed as a mere development of the period between 1870 and 1914, understood as the outcome of a process that started with the Renaissance – there were only three ways to explain this novelty. The first talks about an irrationalist parenthesis, an insurrection of vitality, an explosion of morbid Romanticism,

9 Regarding the thesis of the unlivability of atheism, see Maritain, Humanisme intégral, 69–70 [Integral Humanism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 59–61].

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and so on.10 But how did it happen that what earlier had expressed itself in the form of bizarre literary works, later determined political reality? Evidently only by activating certain germs – and thus we move on to the second way – that were already present in Italian and German history, and, as far as the Stalinist involution is concerned, in Russia. But why, in Europe, did the educated classes, the small and the great bourgeoisie, join the irrationalist movements? One must logically arrive at an interpretation in terms of class. The bourgeois class, which during its rising period had associated itself with the expansion of rationalism, at the time of its sunset had to mobilize irrational powers. In this way one accepts a historico-materialistic interpretation of contemporary political reality; and, curiously, this happens precisely as a result of having underestimated the philosophical moment of Marxism. We must recognize in the final moment of Mounier’s experience, whose nobility is beyond doubt, the martyrdom to which the error of this position leads when it is lived by a Catholic all the way to its extreme consequences. Indeed, whereas, according to the first position, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism are reduced to genera of a common species, in the second and third they are set in opposition to the advantage of Communism; so that this latter becomes “the only bastion of the oppressed, so much so that every anti-Communist thesis transmogrifies automatically into a right-wing thesis,” whereas Fascism is characterized by “the rejection of Christian spirituality as existence, replaced by the idea of spirituality as strength,” and every form of anti-Communism “tries to shore up everything that is dying and is poisoning the country with its overextended agony; and is above all the necessary and sufficient form of crystallization for Fascism to take new life.” And yet, he still rejects Marxism as a crude “totalitarian philosophy which reduces every

10 Certain philosophical developments in thinkers belonging to “yesterday’s world” can only be understood relative to this interpretation. I mentioned Benda’s philosophy. But think, too, of the introduction in the last form of Croce’s thought of the category of vitality; which is, yes, matter for subsequent categories but at the same time is persistent negativity, so that it takes the appearance of reality’s original sin. This is the tribute that the old philosopher paid to the dualistic pessimism that is necessarily linked with this interpretation of contemporary history and that, until then, he had tenaciously resisted.

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spiritual activity to a reflection of economic circumstances, while it neglects or denies the mysteries of man and of being.”11 This necessity to reject simultaneously philosophical Marxism and every form of anti-Communism, while burning with political tension, leads to an unlivable situation (Mounier’s premature death is symbolic); still, it is a necessary consequence of a certain interpretation of contemporary history whereby Communism and Fascism are in a relation of pure opposition and, ultimately, anti-Communism and barbarity are linked together. Everybody can see the connection between this position and the definition of atheism, which I have discussed; the only philosophical continuation of Mounierism had to develop in that direction, as it happened. In actuality, when one recognizes the unity between Marxism’s philosophical power and political power, and at the same time its inadequacy, the criteria of closeness and opposition no longer apply: Fascism and Nazism are blowbacks (in the context of an inability to surpass Marxism at the ideal level), in countries that felt threatened, of the failure of Marxism as a world revolution. 3) Hence a materialistic interpretation of contemporary history, which is the exact opposite of the one I have proposed. Certainly, interpreting a particular period in terms of the prevalence of the economic factor does not require, as such, accepting the whole Marxist philosophy. But, on the other hand, according to this vision the specific character of today’s history requires recurring to some theses of Marx that are directly linked with his philosophy (mystification, alienation). Without referring to this consideration of today’s history, it is impossible to explain the genesis of secular and Catholic progressivism, and the process whereby these forms have to spread to philosophy, and why they continue the stance of sublation [inveramento], whose true beginning is found in Gentile. Moreover, certain religious philosophies are obliged to embrace this interpretation because of their historical perspective. We have seen

11 The sentences I quoted come from Révolution personnaliste et communautaire (Paris: Aubier, 1935), 139; Feu la chrétienté (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1950), 38 and 190; Les certitudes difficiles (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951), 188. Other harsh judgments on theoretical Marxism are found in Feu la chrétienté, 141–2 and 158. It would be a useful study to track the necessary trajectory of decline of French Catholic philosophical-political thought from Maritain to Mounier and then to Teilhard due to that first germ of error that I have detected in Maritain’s position.

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this about the neo-Thomist commentary on St Thomas – if it is defined as I said, as a position that arises out of the crisis of Ontologism and determines its essential features in reference to it12 – at the stage when it is forced to give up the reactionary image (I am not using this word in a pejorative sense at all) of being “anti-modern.” Consequently, the interpretation that sees in Marx a union of moralism and atheism, because his adversary is Hegel’s God, makes sense. The process whereby one moves from this to the idea that atheism is a lucid acceptance of evil and a determined revolt against it, in a form of pessimism that is at the same time a commitment to effective action, is very easy to understand; and so is the break with scholastic cosmologism in the name of personalism, and then the proposal to revise all of Catholic thought to absorb the truth of evolutionism and Marxism, the only adequate philosophies for our time, in the name of the transition to the “post-Galileian age.” 4) It is precisely from this indivisibility from a vision of contemporary history that the recent interpretation of atheism draws its power to persuade and to spread. But once it is separated from it – and once this interpretation has been called into question and found to be untenable, as I tried to do in outline – its arguments turn out to be weak. Indeed, let us consider its essential thesis – the elevation of moralism and of the agonistic stance against evil to primary characteristics of atheism. We must observe that the word “morality” takes entirely ­different meanings in traditional ethics and in atheism. Certainly, we can speak of a moral moment of atheism in three senses. •

In the sense that there is a moral choice already at the beginning of rationalism,13 which is manifested precisely by the postulatory ­aspect that atheism must take in its extreme forms; however, it is not a choice in favour of autonomy, as refusal to grant moral significance

12 I think that, therefore, we can say that what defines the characteristic profile of neo-Thomism is the attempt to sharply separate Thomism and Ontologism. We ought to wonder whether the thought process of the most recent Thomist authors does not move in the opposite direction, even though they seldom use the word “Ontologism,” which as I said is difficult to define precisely. 13 In the sense defined starting on page 10.

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to a law purely imposed from outside, but, rather, in favour of man’s self-sufficiency.14 In the sense that the step from Idealistic rationalism to atheism is not reducible to a purely speculative process but stems from the quest for consistency between thought and life. In the sense, finally, that there is an ethical commitment to ­transform man’s situation in the world, in the terminal moment of libertine atheism as well as in Marx and in Nietzsche: “for the Prometheans the expansion of freedom down here will be limitless; they dream that the universe will became completely pliable to their desires; certainly, they know well that today this freedom is not ­exercised like omnipotence on nothingness, but rather dramatically against an antagonistic world; and yet they dream of a time when these hostilities will cease through the radical triumph of human freedoms. And the faith on which their false religion is founded ­consists in this.”15

It remains true that the constitutive feature of this morality is the yes to (worldly and historical) being, based on the affirmation of the “normality” of the human situation, which is a consequence of the negation of the idea of the Fall, in which I have tried to identify the essence of rationalism. The ethical quest of atheism is for a full reconciliation of man and nature, either understood as a complete harmonization 14 A passage from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is decisive in this regard: “A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life – if he is the source of my life. When it is not my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it.” And further on, in the same work: “But since for socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of the process of his creation” [TN: ed. D. Struik, trans. M. Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 144–5]. 15 M. Carrouges, La mystique du surhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 359. I found in this book – which is devoted above all to the study of atheism in modern French poetry, and of which I became aware only while I was drafting the Introduction (in Italy it has gone almost unnoticed) – a complete confirmation of my interpretation of atheism and its future.

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with the creative possibilities of nature or, oppositely, as a humanization of nature freed from the divine disguise. The practical stance of atheists takes the meaning of accepting the “harshness” of reality, denying completely “compassion” and “charity.” The apology of cruelty does not belong only to de Sade or Lautréamont but also to Nietzsche, even if it is unpleasant to say; and also to Marx as concerns the acceptance of evil as the process that leads to good. Only through this acceptance will we get to that total transformation of reality, as deification of man,16

16 The idea of a total transformation of reality appears already at the endpoint of libertine atheism, in de Sade’s thought. Klossowski rightly highlights this curious text of his: “If man destroys himself, he does wrong – in his own eyes. But that is not the view Nature takes of the thing. As she sees it, if he multiplies he does wrong, for he usurps from Nature the honor of a new phenomenon, creatures being the necessary result of her workings. If those creatures that are cast were not to propagate themselves, she would cast new entities and enjoy a faculty she has ceased to be able to exercise” (De Sade as quoted in Klossowski, Sade my Neighbor, trans. A. Lingis [Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991], 85). He remarks: “The conception of Nature as aspiring to renew her most active power marks a a dehumanization of Sade’s thought – a dehumanization that now takes on the form of a singular metaphysics. If Sade … now goes so far as to consider man to be entirely distinct from Nature, it is in order to bring out more effectively a profound discord between the notion of the human being and the notion of the universe, and to explain how all the attempts he attributes to Nature to repossess her rights must be proportionate to this discord. We might also see in all this Sade’s will to separate himself from solidarity with man by imposing on himself the categorical imperative of a cosmic tribunal that demands the annihilation of all that is human” (86–7). Therefore Klossowski also raises the question of whether Sade’s ultimate question may not be essentially the following: “Is man really a termination?” (86n10); and whether the moral meaning taken for him by aspects like corruption, putrefaction, dissolution, and annihilation must not be linked to the core idea of “Nature’s aspiration to … return to the unconditioned state” (90); which confirms my idea that all forms of atheism refer necessarily to the conception of finite individuality declared in the myth of Anaximander. Certainly Marx’s atheism takes the viewpoint exactly opposite to Sade’s because Marx’s God is not Nature but History. But man after the realization of Communism is a supernatural being, and he is such precisely to the extent that he has moved beyond the characters of finite individuality. Indeed, he would be a man for whom all distinctions would disappear: between mine and yours in the realm of property; between permitted and forbidden in the realm of morality and of the state; between thought and its objects in the realm of science; between form and perceptible matter in the  realm of art; between down here and beyond in religious life; in short, every ­opposition between him and others, between him and nature, with all that this last

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such that the name of God will be reduced to a meaningless group of letters (the surpassing of atheism that is at the same time its realization,

opposition implies, space, time, perceptible qualities, and so on. This according to the pertinent remarks by the most acute French critic of and commentator on Marxism, Fr Fessard (Le dialogue catholique-communiste est il possible? [Paris: Grasset, 1937], 224– 5), to whom Carrouges (La mystique, 224–6) also refers. We see from here how incorrect it is to define atheism in terms of pessimism and moral revolt as, for example, Borne does. Conversely, I think that it is precisely having dissociated the terms “pessimism” and “atheism,” with unprecedented and insuperable rigour, that is Martinetti’s great merit (even though in my judgment his limitation is that he keeps this truth inside the horizon of rationalism, and of the concept of individualism, which is proper to rationalism; so that his thought can and must be continued but only through a sharp break). According to him, as we have seen, pessimism is the refusal to reconcile with phenomenic reality in the name of pure Christian morality. Nothing is farther away from the pessimistic morality of the absolute no to worldly and historical reality (hence its taking shape as morality of the irrevocability of actions) than the atheistic morality of yes to nature or history, which does imply the moment of negation but in order to erase from worldly reality every aspect that can give rise to the thought of God (hence its taking shape as morality of the result). It is very curious that Borne, who is a rigorous thinker, in perfect consistency with his interpretation must go so far as writing: “therefore it follows … that Marxism is a false atheism, and that we could not ask it to play a purifying function in the questions about God and evil, because it participates in the backward motion towards wisdom: its divinized humanity is, barely renewed, the old myth in which the problem of evil dissipates without being posed. Being a return to the origins of thought, Marxism is thus, at least philosophically, the opposite of progressivism” (Le problème du mal, 99). Indeed, his definition of atheism leads Borne to characterize it as giving decisive value to free individual conscience, as a profanation that redeems the true cosmic and social profanation of the sacred; and to see its philosophical expression in a form of atheistic existentialism that ultimately, since it is antithetical to Marxism, could only take Stirner’s form, for an evaluation of which see the considerations I made in the introductory essay. These considerations can also guide us in reaching a definitive formulation of the critique of Maritain’s theses. When he reproaches atheism for not carrying its revolt to completion but stopping instead at opposing to the God who consecrates the world’s evil the other false God, which is history, he shows that he does not understand at all (or does not want to understand, because his inadequate definition of atheism is required by his historical outlook) the essential point of atheism, which lies in totally changing the notion of morality. The parallel between Sade and Marx is useful in showing that atheism is always necessarily materialistic not because it abides by vulgar naturalistic materialism but because it rejects the idea of participation. It also raises a question of the greatest importance, which I will have to study further, regarding the relations between

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a thesis that in Marx is perfectly equivalent to that of the surpassingrealization of philosophy). It is based on the radicalness of this transformation that the character of total revolt, which is proper to atheism, must be explained. Likewise, it is only in reference to atheism that Marx’s famous sentence about philosophies – that until now have interpreted the world, while what matters is to change it – takes its full meaning. Besides, the revolt against God in the name of the humanization of nature is completely different from the revolt against the collective and against necessity in the name of the individual; the latter leads, instead, to a religious position, and this is where the question of the continuity between Stirner and Kierkegaard and the question of Shestov become extremely important. 5) The following are further proofs that the process leading to atheism starts by taking a stance regarding the not objectively representable, and thus unverifiable, historicity of original sin: a) The fact that atheism cannot seek its criterion of truth in the proof of the non-existence of God but, rather, in the acknowledgment of his death because the idea of God no longer directs us in actual practical choices but enters into them as a mere instrument in order to give an absolute character to a determined historical order, which therefore presents itself as closed. This historical proof naturally ­implies the idea that only an atheist philosophy can account for the historical process as it has unfolded so far. b) The fact that the endpoint of rationalism coincides with the endpoint of the idea of Revolution characterized by the transposition of the dogma of the Fall onto the level of historical experience.17 Hence the necessity of studying the historical development of the idea of Revolution and the formation within it of the usual historical narratives, which were the context in which the subsequent historical materialism and dialectical materialism. Normally people think that dialectical materialism represents the inclusion of historical materialism in a general system of the world; I believe we must say, instead, that dialectical materialism (and here I disregard the form it has taken in Russia – that of scientistic dogmatism) is a necessary condition for the transition to the “historical” conception of materialism. I think that a study of the idea of dialectics in Marx should be carried out from this perspective. 17 Regarding how this transposition takes place in Marxism, and its preservation in Russian Marxism, see, for example, among many people who wrote about it, G.A. Wetter, Le matérialisme dialectique, 594–5 [TN: Dialectical Materialism, 559–60].

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philosophies built themselves up, changing in relation to the new ­adversaries they had to face (thus, for example, neo-Hegelianism is Hegelianism after Marxism and positivism) but without criticizing them at the root. Those historical narratives are inevitably inferior to the Marxist one because they start from the idea that the Revolution has already taken place in its stage as the French Revolution. This is why Marxism appears to be unsurmountable by the existing ­philosophies; and why it really is unsurmountable, to the extent that such philosophies are not able to reform themselves because this reform requires defining a historical narrative that accounts for the final outcome of the idea of Revolution and for the place of atheism in history.

If atheism means taking a stance with respect to human history, if it is born neither from morality, nor from science, nor from art, criticizing it must concern first of all the way in which it places itself in the history of philosophy (the choice it proposes, in its form as political atheism, between socialism and barbarism makes sense, as we have seen, only relative to an interpretation of history). In this book I have tried to show that it must accept the thesis that the history of philosophy is a process of secularization, a thesis that, valid in Idealistic rationalism, ceases being valid after the critique of this latter operated by atheism itself. One cannot place atheism in history as a position ulterior to the philosophy of immanent divinity without reinterpreting the history of modern philosophy, raising the question of whether Italian and French philosophy of a religious orientation has really been surpassed by classical German thought, which in effect ends in atheism, or by Anglo-American empiricism in the aspect in which it ends up “losing the sacred” – betraying, in my judgment, the deepest motif of empiricism. In any case, these are not two distinct questions because this empiricism presupposes that FrenchItalian religious philosophy has already been surpassed by classical German philosophy, with respect to which it presents itself as an ulterior position, which erases its mystical aspects. 6) Moving on to the political aspect that is essential to atheism, we must observe that it is always totalitarian and that the reciprocal statement is also true: atheism and totalitarianism form an indissoluble unity. We have defined Marxist totalitarianism in terms of the ethics of the direction of history; and this applies to atheism that is actually able to enter politics. But scientistic atheism is also totalitarian (how could

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there be freedom with respect to “scientifically proven truths”?)18 and so is aesthetic atheism. That is, atheism, in its refusal to link values to the religious Value, is led consistently to absolutize one specific value, which is thought to include all others, but in fact this inclusion manifests itself as their pure negation. Hence the connection today between religious reaffirmation and liberal reaffirmation. Certainly, this viewpoint may seem questionable, and the fundamental objections to the interpretation of today’s conflict as a religious struggle can be found in an article by Hanna Arendt.19 I regard as entirely nonsensical the position of those who think, just like Arendt, that they can cut short the discussion of Marx’s atheism, regarding the question as entirely marginal in his work for the simple reason that his atheism is not speculative since Marx renounces the attempt to prove the nonexistence of God. It is quite clear that this proof is absolutely impossible and that, precisely for this reason, Marx shifted to a critique of speculative philosophy. Nor can the critique of religion be conceived in the Enlightenment’s fashion (Boulanger etc.) as a revelation of its origins. This is the road that ends in psychoanalytic atheism, whose acritical character I mentioned. Marx understood that there is but one way to strike at religion, that of effectively suppressing its roots. That is, neither the metaphysical way nor the historic or scientific way but the political way; which, as it happens, is a full confirmation of my thesis about the priority of the political moment in atheism. But how will the realization of Communism have atheism as its “result”? Will death possibly disappear in a Communist regime? And how can death not raise the questions it has traditionally raised, even assuming a perfectly just society? Are we not entitled to hope for reparation for the hundreds of millions of innocent victims that the process of history has steamrolled during its course? It seems to me that only one answer is possible. The revolution 18 An essential text that illustrates this point is the sociocracy that follows from Comte’s intentional atheism. 19 Hanna Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in Confluence: An International Forum II, 3 (September 1953): 105–26. Arendt writes – and this seems entirely questionable to me: “The concept of freedom (and this is primarily a struggle between the free world and Totalitarianism) is certainly not of religious origin” (111). Although, further down, she is right to protest against a certain type of sociologism that treats ideology and religion as the same thing because it is convinced that every vision of the world boils down to an ideology and, thus, to a myth.

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leading to Communism can only be realized through an ethics founded on an absolutely atheified conception of man, whose adoption imposes itself as necessary in any case because the alternative is thought to be radical barbarism. Only in this sense, I think, can we say that the realization of Communism must coincide with the disappearance of the ­question of God. From the recognition of the link between atheism and totalitarianism we can draw an initial legitimate induction about the usual thesis that Marx “inherited” totalitarianism from Hegel. I think one must reply that Hegel’s conception of the state is not by itself totalitarian; rather, it only carries the possibility of becoming totalitarian in the Marxist inversion. 7) Positive atheism has historically won in its Marxist form, but this victory has coincided with its defeat. In the first place, because it has given prophetic value to the intuition of its greatest adversary, Nietzsche, himself defeated due to the powerlessness to which his thought finds itself reduced in practice. Dialectical materialism has become an instrument of the will to power, but not of a superman, not of he who accepts the thought of the “eternal return,” but of the man in whom the herd recognizes itself and who speaks to it, today, the suitable language, that of the “inventor of happiness.” Furthermore, Marxism has decomposed into two forms: dialectical materialism and socialism. And the process of Communism is oriented towards accepting the values of the affluent society, measured by sociologism. Thus, the dimension of the past is lost (which is what bourgeois society has accepted from Marxism, realizing itself as purely bourgeois, separated from any reference to other values that “mystified” it), but the dimension of the future is lost as well. Thus, the realization of human fullness and freedom has been replaced by the process of man’s involution into animality (i.e., radical nihilism). The expression of this just-bourgeois-bourgeoisie (i.e., of a society reduced to mere economic relations) is today’s pure democracy, as democracy elevated to a value, which is different from totalitarianism in the exact same terms in which the “loss of the sacred” is different from atheism, and only in those terms. This is because it, too, is founded, in the final analysis, only on force (i.e., the number of votes), nor does it recognize, besides force, the authority of other values. The disappearance of the question of God is taking place in a form that the atheist philosophers did not foresee but that confirms, instead, a view held by religious thought: namely, that only the idea of

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participation makes possible a real distinction between man and animal; the idea of homo faber erases it, seeing in man an animal that uses a particular system of signs (language), which makes him capable of actively adapting to new situations. 8) But from this defeat of positive atheism we must not infer the too easy victory of religious transcendence. In fact, what is contradictory about the moral or even physical disappearance of man? A discourse against nihilism based on values constitutes, as Heidegger correctly remarks, the complete nihilistic discourse. Moreover, what is being defeated today is atheism in its mystical aspect, not the position, which is ulterior to it, of the “loss of the sacred.” 9) Let us begin by observing that the failure of the idea of the Revolution in the theological sense I described coincides with the failure of the idea of Counter-Revolution in its reactionary sense. We have already seen that the reactionary position (the condemnation of the “modern” in the name of any past) can only lead to a complete break between theory and practice, so that the past, devoid of any compelling value, becomes, indeed, pure “past,” what “is no longer” and that which nobody will ever be able to re-establish. A reactionary position could subsist when there were still some traces of the sacral civilization of the Middle Ages; the process of history, from the First World War on, has destroyed them. So, the “right” has been annihilated, but the “centre” and the “left” have been equally annihilated.20 Belonging to the “centre” means to mediate, but what will it mean, for example, for a party of Catholics or for a liberal party to mediate between two equally irreligious and equally illiberal forms? Being on the left today takes the meaning, regardless of the intentions of those who profess to be on the left, of becoming the defender of the constitutive disorder of the present. Therefore, the fight against the process of dehumanization, if possible, could only take the form of a fight against today’s world in its totality,

20 I am speaking, of course, in terms of political philosophy and not immediately in terms of practical politics, where it is obviously impossible to do completely without such phraseology; and where very often one has to choose the lesser evil – that is, in connection with what has been said, the conditions that preserve a country from permanent servitude. Regarding the end of the “right,” the position of “apolitia” that pure counter-revolutionary thought is forced to take is characteristic. On this topic, J. Evola’s observations in Cavalcare la tigre (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1961), 244ff, are very remarkable.

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in the name of the individual and of the universal humanity that is being negated by negating the individual. It is therefore, in a sense, a revolutionary position. Should we develop a true concept of revolution to be opposed to the theological concept we have so far discussed? This seems ambiguous to me because we cannot forget that the present situation is the result of the idea of Revolution carried to its extreme consequences. Hence the need for a new word.21 10) But is this fight possible? The question cannot have any other meaning but whether atheism can be surpassed, even after having recognized that so far it has not been formally surpassed. We face here the thesis that Marxism is insuperable, as it has been formulated by Sartre: anti-Marxism must choose between going back to pre-Marxist ideas and rediscovering ideas that have already been formulated by Marxism. But does this thesis have true power? It is quite true that Marxism is insuperable within that particular line of thought that I have defined as rationalism. But we have seen that rationalism is conditioned by an initial act of faith, by an original choice that rules out the supernatural, a choice that comes to light in the postulatory character that atheism must take. Consequently, from the insuperability of Marxism within rationalism one can only derive the following truth, which curiously is valid against Sartre himself: Marxism cannot be the object of “sublation”; the quest to surpass it cannot configure itself as dialectic surpassing but must start precisely from the insuperability of its contradiction, as the unveiling of the erroneousness of a line of thought. The contradiction is such that it cannot be overcome either in Marxism itself or in an ulterior form within rationalism itself, or, finally, be healed in a synthesis

21 It is important to point out that the theses I am presenting here are, at least in many respects, extremely similar to those that F. Rodano has developed in the still unfinished series of his admirable essays in Rivista Trimestrale (“Il processo di formazione della ‘società opulenta,’” 2 [1962]; “Il pensiero cattolico di fronte alla ‘società opulenta,’” 3 [1962]; “Sul concetto di rivoluzione,” 5–6 and 7–8 [1963]). In fact, our judgment is identical regarding the dehumanization process of the affluent society and the relationship between Marxism and sociologism; regarding the inadequacy of the position of pure conservation and regarding its inevitable conclusion in De Maistre’s “genial” but, by now, historically exhausted “reactionarism”; and regarding the need to problematize the idea of revolution because the one that has been proposed until now by Marxism is inadequate … but regarding the manner of this problematization, our agreement (or disagreement) will become precise only after a lengthy discussion, which I plan to write when the series of articles is finished.

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with other forms of thought because all of them lead to eclectic results. Given this, the obligation to return to pre-Marxist positions is certainly true; but it will be necessary to prove that they are up to the task of reaffirming themselves after Marxism – that is, of re-forming themselves. In short, in order to draw the line of resistance of non-Marxist culture to Marxism, we must think, rather than of Hegelian dialectics, of those “acts of self-preservation” by which, according to Herbart, the “reals” defend themselves from “perturbations,” threats of destruction, produced in them by other reals. Or, if we want to speak in terms that by now have been made current by Toynbee, and which have become completely superficial in common usage, for philosophy and for Western society, it is not a matter of “surpassing” or “sublating” but, rather, of answering a challenge. 11) Until today, only two attempts have been made to move beyond Marxism in the sense I just described: in the secular world by Croce’s thought and in the Catholic world by Maritain’s thought. These two philosophers cannot be adequately evaluated without giving Marxism its rightful place (even though Croce had to end up denying Marxism’s philosophical significance, thus preparing himself his present outdatedness). Both these attempts failed, but the analysis of their failure deserves the greatest attention. Indeed, Croce established three essential points. The first – which is the simplest and the best known, but is such that it must absolutely not be overlooked, and which is seldom understood in its full meaning – is that the reaffirmation of liberalism after Marxism can only take the form of a dissociation from liberism.22 However, in Croce this distinction effectively takes the meaning of an identity of liberalism … and conservatism. In the last essay I wondered whether the question of this dissociation must not lead to a critique of the immanentistic formulation of liberalism. The second point is much less known but is crucially important. Croce understood that moving beyond Marxism could not take the form of sublation (hence his criticism of liberal socialism and similar forms). But this can only mean that the critique of Marxism can only take the form of a reform of a previous thought; or that the philosophical function of Marxism cannot be defined other than as a dialectic reagent. Therefore, we understand why Croce met, in the years of his first critique of Marxism, Herbart’s

22 [TN] See note 11 on page 429.

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thought, and why he drew from it a decisive suggestion (the idea of the distinti) for the reform of Hegelian dialectics, which supposedly makes it possible to avoid the Marxist inversion.23 A broader discussion would show that, in the context of Croce’s presupposed and unquestioned immanentism, the thought liable to be reformed could only be that of Hegel. The third, equally important, point is that moving beyond Marxism cannot but coincide with rediscovering a line of thought that starts from Vico. We have already seen, in this regard, that Croce’s book on Vico is actually an integral part of his philosophy, so that any criticism of it calls into question Croce’s whole thought; so that the natural form that a book on Croce ought to take is that of a history of his encounters with Vico, in the sense that every deepening of his thought appeared to him as a clarification of Vico’s thought. Of course, Croce’s Vico cannot but be Vico after Hegel, reaffirmed as relevant after Hegel in order to bring to completion his immanentism. And the most curious thing is the fact that Vico separated from Ontologism and Occasionalism – which in 1911 Croce regarded as non-critical positions, in agreement with a common judgment at that time – really becomes the precursor of Croce’s thought and of his form of historicism. The possible question as to whether Croce’s thought

23 See the essay “Commiato dallo Herbart,” in Discorsi di varia filosofia, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1945) and also the essay that immediately follows it in the same collection, “I ‘neo’ in filosofia.” In it, Croce essentially affirms that Herbart’s exigences visà-vis the philosophies of the dissolution of Hegelianism are valid until the time when this crisis is overcome “in a new and genuine philosophy which .. undoes that system [Hegel’s] from the foundation and .. by the same deed includes all of it in the new building with its new foundation” (115); until, that is, Croce’s philosophy. Not enough attention has been paid to this passage: generally, scholars of Croce, restricting themselves to the pages of the Contributo, have limited Herbart’s influence on the young Croce to pure moral rigourism, in which he supposedly found an armour against the positivist dissolution of ethics. Therefore, his Herbartism was supposedly an aspect of Labriola’s influence, in the development of whose thought the Herbartian moment does indeed have that meaning. Actually, Herbart’s philosophy also played a role, and a much more important one, in his subsequent disagreement with Labriola, who was not very receptive to the distinti, which he considered to be a residue of Platonism, of Scholasticism, of speculative philosophy. It must be pointed out, in reference to what I said about the link between atheism and totalitarianism, that in the enunciation of the theory of distinti we find already implicit – even though certainly (do I need to say it?) unaware – Croce’s future antitotalitarian polemic, with all the historical motifs that depend on it.

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process ended in Vico expressly because of the inadequate interpretation of Marxism in the book of his youth is baseless: because the link with Vico grew especially tight right after Croce became aware of the philosophical character of Marx’s work – an awareness that characterizes the final period of his thought. Therefore, there is still reason to wonder whether this encounter with Vico in the process of surpassing Marxism may turn out to be necessary even after Croce’s defeat, although of course with a Vico who is no longer Croce’s. 12) If we now ask ourselves what may have been the reasons for the defeat, despite having correctly posed the question, we must say that we cannot trace it back to anything other than a presupposition tacitly accepted by Croce – namely, that the history of philosophy is a process of secularization; that is, to his acceptance of a certain historiographic perspective whereby one could no longer talk about the question of transcendence, which was taken as already solved and left behind. Hence the critical problem raised by Croce’s thought: its continuation can only be precisely the study of “the history of philosophy as a problem” in the sense discussed so far. We can add that only in this way we are his disciples, in the sense of valuing his affirmation that we should always think in relation to a historical situation. It is the present historical situation, in as much as it is absolutely unforeseen and inexplicable from Croce’s perspective, that imposes, and should also impose from his perspective, a problematization of his thought that can only take the form of a reproposal of the question of transcendence. 13) The remarks that can be made about Maritain are similar. He correctly saw that the reaffirmation of Christian thought after Marxism required the abandonment of the identification between the ideal of Christendom and a determined historical Christendom; it required, therefore, a critique of the standard Medievalistic-reactionary approach of Catholic thought. This affirmation was made based on the need to distinguish between the eternal and transcendent and the temporal and historic; thus, from an essentially anti-modernist standpoint. From a certain angle, we can see in the pupil of Bloy, of the last great reactionary writer, the point of arrival of anti-modernism; in this sense, there is a perfect consistency between the reactionary Maritain of the 1920s and the later Maritain, in that a deepening of anti-modernism requires a critique of reactionary thought. But he rethought this truth from within the neo-Thomist commentary on St Thomas and the vision of the history of philosophy that necessarily follows from it. Is it as a

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consequence of this that Maritain became the one who opened the way, of course unwillingly, to neo-modernism understood as an alliance no longer, like old modernism, between Catholicism and the forms of thought tied to the Idealist reaction against science of the years after 1890 – with religious pragmatism, to use an overall formula (with those forms that had already been beaten by Idealist immanentism) – but with Marxism? An answer to this question has been sought in essay VII. Assuming that it is correct, we have to say that the failure of Maritain’s attempt, too, leads us back to the question of the history of philosophy as a problem, just as it did in Croce’s case. 14) As a consequence, we must shift to the question of whether there is a modern philosophical line [Ontologism] that Marxism has totally ignored and that is altogether irreducible to those it considered. It ignored this line first of all because it had been ignored by Hegel, who dealt only with one ontologist in his history of philosophy, Malebranche, and practically excluded him from the history of thought by judging his philosophy to be a process towards Spinozism, cut short by extraphilosophical concerns. Recognizing its development shows that within its line the type of the philosopher of history and that of the political philosopher come to the fore; the emergence of the latter marks its crisis but then also the overcoming of this crisis – although, in my view, partial and in need of integration – in Rosmini after Gioberti. I just talked about the concept of a “true” revolution as restoration of the human; we have seen that, from the theoretical standpoint, it cannot but take the guise of a reform, in the etymological sense, of a tradition of thought. Now, do we not have a suitable term to characterize this restoration-revolution in all its meanings? We can think of the term “Risorgimento,” understood as a philosophical category, independent of any immediate reference to the Italian Risorgimento; although, in fact, a worked out a priori definition of Risorgimento as a category is necessary for a correct evaluation of this historical fact and of the reason for its crisis, in which we still find ourselves.24 24 We can say that the idea of Risorgimento as a primarily philosophical category is essential to Italian Ontologism. See, for example, Carabellese, L’idealismo italiano (Naples: Loffredo, 1938), 82, where he protests against the usual presentation of the Risorgimento “just as a great political event, limited, also as political, only to the Italian nation, and without reflections on the remaining spiritual activity. It is true

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15) How can a study of modern Ontologism be conducted? I already traced the outline of the first part, from Descartes to Vico. But, clearly, while this first part pushes into a crisis the usual scheme of historical periodization, especially regarding the question of the relationship between Catholic Reformation and modern philosophy, it cannot show the possibility and the form of the reaffirmation of this philosophy today. Therefore, we must shift our attention to the Gentile problem. The fate of his thought has been quite curious. This is because, in a sense, he, the great surpasser, today seems completely surpassed. Indeed, it was around 1920, at the time of his greatest success, that the verb “to surpass” [superare] became fashionable; no longer in the original sense in which the idea of “preserving” is as essential as that of going beyond but, rather, in the sense of “getting rid of” because Idealism is always underlain by a certain dualism, by the admission of the possibility of another point of view, realistic and naturalistic if you like. This point of

that the core question of this movement is the ethical-political one; but that does not mean that it limits itself to the conquest of the unity and independence of Italy, and that it starts only when this conquest is implemented in political action. As in the Renaissance, also in the Risorgimento there is a profound philosophical soul.” It  would not be incorrect to say that, just as for Marx and Engels, the Revolution was  the conclusive process of classical German philosophy, so for Carabellese the Risorgimento, understood in a universalistic and not nationalistic sense, is the conclusion of what he calls “Italian Idealism” (in his sense of Idealist Ontologism). His quotation of a passage by Gioberti, in the opening speech in Rome in 1930 (L’idealismo italiano, 16), is important. Essentially, it states clearly that the idea of the Risorgimento as a philosophical category takes priority over its political reality. It is true that Carabellese looks for the adequate political expression of this philosophical idea in Mazzini … and here I truly can no longer follow him. Regarding the relationship between Risorgimento as a philosophical category and Risogimento as a historical reality, I read now on La Stampa (28 February 1964) this remark by A.C. Jemolo: “the book that marks the beginning of the Risorgimento, the Primato morale e civile” [Vincenzo Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (Brussels: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1843)]. But is not the Primato the political face of the ontologistic Introduzione allo studio della filosofia? The Gioberti problem deserves to be restudied in its entirety. Considered as a philosophical category, the word “Risorgimento” has indeed the sense of a Restoration not of a previous factual situation but of an order of values; of a rediscovery and a new development of permanent principles, with respect to new adversaries; of a purification, occasioned by new problems, of a tradition. Today, that would be the tradition of homo sapiens as opposed to the heresies of European thought inspired by the idea of homo faber.

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view is declared to be unthinkable, absurd, but then the entire history of philosophy was conceived as a struggle against this unthinkable until it was defeated for good by absolute Idealism; even though one then discovered that this “unthinkable realism” in fact had never been thought by anybody, and did not match any historical form of realism, so that the problem of realism had to be set up otherwise. His philosophy is often perceived as the symbol of Italy’s isolation from world culture; but actually his influence continues, and in the aspect that I find most disagreeable, the scheme of the sublation of Marxism, which he initiated, even though, generally, in his often unaware continuators there is no reference to his work. But what confers his philosophy a very particular, and unique, interest, is the fact that the line from Spaventa to Gentile has been the only one to pose to itself a problem of which no trace could be found in Hegel – that of surpassing Ontologism. Gentile’s philosophy is exactly what Hegelianism must become in order to go beyond Ontologism, while simultaneously going beyond philosophical Marxism; and let us not ask now – even though the question is extremely important, especially so as to account for the different profile of the Gentilian left compared to the Hegelian left – whether as a result it had to stop being Hegelianism and meet and bring to conclusion Fichte’s line against Hegel. Now, what form does Ontologism have to assume in order to reaffirm itself after Gentile? In this investigation one encounters the Carabellese question and the Heidegger question; but in both of them the rediscovery of Ontologism is associated with the preservation of Gentile’s historical perspective – certainly reformed by the former to affirm the autonomy and primacy of Italian thought, and inverted by the latter, but not criticized in its immanentistic presupposition by either one of them. This may be the sign of the limitations of their renewal of Ontologism. By identifying the fulfilment of Gioberti with his secularization, Gentile also realized his program of sublating into Italian thought German philosophy  – viewed from an angle that also included Marx (but not Kierkegaard’s line, and even less Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s) and French philosophy taken as a philosophy of interiority that concluded in modernism (hence Gentile’s surpassing-preserving of modernism, which coincided, of course, with a liquidation of Catholic modernism). The synthesis fell apart, and its various elements resurfaced. On one side Marxism, on the other religious French philosophy. Thus, it will be necessary to conduct a parallel investigation of French philosophy

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after 1930, or, to be more precise, after the crucially important querelle of 1931 on the “Philosophie Chrétienne.” We need to examine with the greatest attention the process whereby the greatest part of it, when it did not run aground in academic formalism, surrendered to progressivism and to the false notion of atheism that characterizes it, or resisted it insufficiently; and to verify if, and to what extent, this surrender is tied to the rejection, or to the insufficient reaffirmation, of Ontologism.

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Index of Names

Acquaviva, S., 244 Adam, A., 382 Adler, M., 187 Adorno, T. W., 160 Al-Ghazali, 401 Alquié, F., 77, 82, 333, 345, 356, 360, 361, 374 Ambrosius Victor, 340 Amerio, F., 399 Anaximander, 17, 18, 74, 152, 460 Andler, Ch., 131 Antoni, C., 188 Arendt, H., 107, 464 Argan, C. G., 415 Aristotle, 74, 249, 250, 251, 338, 347, 403 Arnauld, A., 94, 303, 317, 331–2, 340, 357, 360, 369–71, 373, 375, 376, 377, 397 Aron, R., 107, 114, 161 Arvon, H., 23–5 Auerbach, E., 348, 352 Augustine (Saint), 82, 147, 282, 310, 338, 340, 347, 360, 366, 387, 388, 396 Ayer, A. J., 239–40

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Baader, F., 61, 82 Bacon, F., 93, 321, 330, 332–3 Bakunin, M., 23–4, 133–4. Baillet, A., 370 Balbo, F., 34, 59, 159, 170, 215, 218, 219, 223, 230–1, 236, 451 Balmès, J. L., 328 Banfi, A., 41 Baratono, A., 154 Barcos, M. de, 317 Bariè, G. E., 41 Barr s, M., 118 Barth, K., 62, 72, 391 Baruzi, J., 392 Bastiat, F., 275 Battaglia, F., 248 Baudelaire, Ch., 156 Baudin, E., 339, 347, 387 Bauer, E., 24 Baumler, A., 142 Bayle, P., 69, 166–7, 333, 394, 399, 401, 411–2, 432–3 Béguin, A., 385 Belaval, Y., 393 Benda, J., 18, 40, 74, 456 Berardi, R., 34

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476

Index of Names

Berdaev, N., 106, 154, 174, 183, 187, 188, 452 Bergson, H., 22–3, 35–6, 330, 438, 455 Berkeley, G., 67, 72, 198, 331, 355, 379, 405, 409 Bernanos, G., 58 Bernstein, E., 154, 184, 187, 189, 190. Bigo, P., 102 Bloch, E., 68, 83, 84, 139, 311 Blondel, M., 30, 62, 154, 156, 324, 395 Bloy, L., 154, 160, 328, 434, 470 Blyernberg, W. van, 15 Bobbio, N., 75, 105, 209, 445, 446, 447 Böhme, J., 61 Bolzano, B., 375 Bonald, L. de, 60, 324, 327, 328, 432, 434 Bontadini, G., 157, 328 Borne, ƒt., 454, 461 Bossuet, J. B., 325 Boulanger, N. A., 464 Boutroux, E., 280, 381 Bréhier, E., 89, 323–4 Bremond, H., 390 Brentano, F., 375 Breton, A., 306 Brunet, C., 406 Bruno, G., 14, 15, 19, 47, 207, 287, 353 Brunschvicg, L., 19, 48, 52–55, 64, 75, 104, 141, 151, 160, 269, 286, 287, 325, 328, 339–340, 382, 389, 398, 404, 405, 425 Buber, M., 25

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Bukharin, N., 183 Bultmann, R., 106 Buonaiuti, E., 323, 399 Burman, E. O., 365, 370 Burnham, J., 107 Busson, H., 242 Calogero, G., 32, 41, 187 Calvin, J., 303, 372 Campanella, T., 239, 242 Camus, A., 115, 156, 294 Capograssi, G., 384, 397, 426 Carabellese, P., 41, 48, 78, 81–2, 158, 287, 388, 394, 471–2, 473 Carrouges, M., 16–7, 459, 461 Cassirer, E., 286 Castelli, E., 41, 141, 156–7, 252, 290 Chesterton, G. K., 257 Chevalier, J., 380, 381 Cohen, H., 202 Combes, E., 425 Comte, A., 21–3, 60, 61, 97, 102, 240, 241, 245, 260, 263, 278, 324, 325, 438, 464 Condorcet, M. J. de, 247, 274, 425 Constant, B., 445 Cornu, A., 180, 191 Corsano, A., 168, 395, 399, 413 Cortès, D., 58, 328, 436 Cotta, S., 111, 295, 426 Croce, B., 5–6, 20, 40–1, 45, 48, 56– 7, 62, 85, 89, 90–1, 92–3, 100, 107, 114, 117, 154, 160, 163, 172–3, 184–5, 186–7, 188, 192– 3, 199, 200, 204, 208, 225, 228, 235, 266–270, 285–6, 287, 295, 301, 310, 323, 324, 325, 326,

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Index of Names 477

384, 395–6, 399, 404, 412, 424, 430, 436, 444–9, 456, 468–471 D’Alembert, J., 60 Damian, P., 150 D’Annunzio, G., 78, 119 Delbos, V., 382 Del Grande, C., 282 Della Volpe, G., 154, 164, 171, 191, 197, 202, 216, 224 De Lubac, H., 22, 102, 141, 146, 273, 275, 276, 438 De Maistre, J., 60, 294, 324, 432, 433 De Man, H., 189 Democritus, 171, 212, 231–2 De Montcheuil, Y., 391, 421 Dempf, A., 55 De Plinval, G., 361 De Rougemont, D., 135, 188 De Ruggiero, G., 20, 409 De Sanctis, F., 117 De Sanctis, G., 207 Descartes, R., 6–7, 9, 11, 12, 25–6, 56, 57, 61, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 78– 9, 81, 96, 130, 148, 155, 158, 166, 167, 168, 238, 249–251, 254, 267, 279, 285, 296–7, 315, 318, 321, 324, 325, 328, 329, 330–3, 335, 339, 340–383, 385, 387, 389, 390, 393, 394, 395, 398, 400, 401–2, 404, 410, 411, 412, 414, 415, 416–8, 422, 440, 443, 449, 452, 472 Deussen, P., 141 Dewey, J., 163, 171, 268, 438 Diagoras of Melos, 10 Diderot, D., 14 Dilthey, W., 45, 62, 86, 286

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Dostoevsky, F., 61, 72, 145–7, 150, 156, 157, 279, 425, 443, 452, 455 Duhem, P.-M., 381 DŸhring, E., 181 Durkheim, E., 31 Engels, F., 87, 98, 99, 110, 129, 133, 153, 163–4, 180–5, 187, 191, 211, 216, 222, 224, 227, 229, 233, 267, 292–3, 472 Epicurus, 171, 212, 231, 412 Epictetus, 303 Evola, J., 466 Eymard, J. d’Angers, 387 Fabro, C., 8–9, 26, 28 Farber, M., 161 Febvre, L., 18–9 Fechner, G. T., 40 Frederick II of Prussia, 203 Fénelon, F., 298, 397 Fessard, G., 3–4, 100, 134, 142, 237, 258, 293, 431, 461 Feuerbach, L., 13, 22, 23, 24, 31, 32, 61, 97, 102–5, 106, 110–3, 115, 141, 159, 171, 178, 181, 186, 191, 196, 199, 222–6, 229, 243, 276, 277, 280, 323, 324, 438 Fichte, J. G., 23, 46, 64, 65, 159, 192, 224, 473 Flam, L., 95–6 Fondane, B., 156 Fontenelle, B., 243 Foucher, L., 328 Freud, S., 20, 306 Galli, G., 41 Garin, E., 159, 163

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478

Index of Names

Garin, P., 370 Gassendi, P., 68, 78 Gentile, G., 32, 41, 48, 64, 75, 81, 82, 85, 90, 114, 116–9, 121–3, 154, 156–7, 193, 240, 267, 285, 286, 287, 301, 324, 418, 419, 445, 453, 457, 472–3 Gentile, M., 405 Geulincx, A., 67, 155, 393, 401–5, 418 Geymonat, L., 29, 51, 170, 174, 450 Gilson, ƒt., 54, 66, 332, 335, 370, 373, 395, 434 Gioberti, V., 71, 82, 83, 324, 327, 329, 375, 394, 418–9, 432, 433, 471–2, 473 Giolitti, G., 92–3, 117, 446 Giusso, L., 394, 399 Gobetti, P., 437 Goldmann, L., 68, 72, 83, 84, 86, 139, 141, 143, 144, 159, 161, 167–8, 265–6, 308–319, 323, 334, 335–6, 339–344, 356, 378, 381–3, 388, 392, 416, 435 Gouhier, H., 23, 60, 66, 73, 155, 241, 263, 298, 355, 359, 364, 366, 367, 373, 383–4, 395, 398, 404, 416 Gramsci, A., 20, 28, 116, 159, 193, 267–8, 310, 444, 445 Grotius, H., 408 Grün, K., 202 Guardini, R., 420 Guarini, G., 415 Gueroult, M., 362, 375, 390, 398, 414 Gurvitch, G., 129, 264 Guzzo, A., 14, 15, 32

Hartmann, N., 21, 32 Hegel, G. F. W., 11, 13, 14–5, 16–8, 19, 21–2, 23, 25, 28, 37, 41, 45, 46, 47, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 78, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 103–4, 122, 124, 130, 132, 134– 5, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151– 2, 159, 166, 167, 177–8, 181–2, 185, 191–6, 202, 208, 211–4, 223–5, 227–8, 231–2, 233–4, 239, 258, 267, 270, 277, 278, 287, 288, 290–3, 299, 310, 311– 2, 313, 324, 325, 327, 331, 345, 391, 393, 396, 422, 437–8, 446, 448, 458, 465, 469, 471, 473 Heidegger, M., 4, 18, 19, 25, 26, 28, 61, 71, 75, 79, 82, 106, 113, 139, 141, 143, 156, 158, 252, 283, 284–5, 466, 473 Helvétius, C. A., 20 Herbart, J. F., 468, 469 Hess, M., 202 Hitler, A., 75, 85, 128, 142 Hobbes, T., 92, 399, 412, 413, 414, 420 Høffding, H., 31 Holbach, P. H. d’, 20, 68, 312 Hook, S., 99, 107, 170 Hume, D., 9, 12–3, 331, 343, 379– 380, 382–3, 401, 418 Husserl, E., 57, 79, 106, 113, 149, 239–240, 375 Huxley, A., 188 Hyppolite, J., 60, 292

Halévy, D., 146 Hartmann, E. von, 19, 21, 22, 40, 46

Jacobi, F. H., 61 James, W., 338

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Izard, G., 174

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Index of Names 479

Janet, P., 421 Jansen, C., 340 Jaspers, K., 79, 106, 107, 141, 395 Jemolo, A. C., 472 John of the Cross, 73 Joachim of Fiore, 56 Julian the Apostate, 425 Juvalta, E., 29–32, 309, 430 Kant, I., 9–13, 20, 33, 36, 37, 41–2, 44, 46, 62, 64, 69, 78–80, 81, 85, 96, 97, 147, 152, 153, 161, 212, 224, 240, 266, 277, 278, 280, 297, 308, 309, 310, 331, 343, 380, 381–3, 391, 404, 410, 416. Kaufmann, F., 142 Kautsky, K. J., 172, 188–9 Kierkegaard, S., 18, 21–2, 25, 28, 45, 70–2, 75, 85, 105, 106, 113, 115, 139, 145, 150, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 168, 169, 211, 322, 438, 452, 462, 473 Klossowski, P., 288, 460 Kojève, A., 291–2 Köstler, A., 188, 228 Koyré, A., 79 Khrushchev, N., 127 Laberthonni re, L., 62, 155, 248– 252, 356, 358, 373 Labriola, A., 184, 186, 469 Lachelier, J., 11 Lacroix, J., 454 Lalande, A., 5, 80 Lamennais, F. R. de, 432, 433, 434 Lamettrie, J., 20, 68 Lana, I., 10 Landsberg, P.-L., 453 Lange, F. A., 20, 67, 286

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Laporte, J., 7, 9, 10, 12–3, 90, 151, 303, 340–3, 346, 356, 366, 367, 371, 372, 374, 376, 378, 380, 386, 393, 395, 406, 410, 440 Lautréamont, C. de, 460 Lavelle, L., 78–9, 106, 158 Lawrence, D. H., 105 Lefebvre, H., 323 Leibniz, G. W., 38, 61–2, 64, 94, 131, 148, 149, 152, 169, 264, 315, 321, 324–5, 335, 342, 345, 355, 366, 370, 371, 391, 392–4, 400, 417, 422, 435 Lener, S., 30 Lenin, V. I., 23, 84, 85, 97, 9, 101, 107, 109, 118, 119, 122–3, 125, 127, 132–3, 135, 137, 139, 145– 6, 153, 173, 179, 183, 184, 200, 203, 217, 424, 453 Lenoble, R., 322, 333, 355, 395 Leo XIII, 60, 328 Leopardi, G., 38–9 Lequier, J., 8, 26–7, 37, 40, 71, 73, 297, 443 Leroy, M., 265, 293, 352, 395 Le Senne, R., 106 Lessing, G. E., 42, 56, 325 Lewis, G., 340, 366 Liberatore, M., 71, 328 Limentani, L., 29 Locke, J., 5, 92, 238, 331, 333, 351, 420, 431 Lombardi, F., 57, 327 Lombardi, G., 426 Lombardo-Radice, L., 179 Lotze, H., 40, 46, 280 Löwith, K., 22, 47, 56, 86–7, 95–6, 130, 141, 167, 191, 204, 294, 409 Louis Philippe, 91

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480

Index of Names

Lukàcs, G., 60, 68, 74, 75, 76, 83, 99, 123, 126, 142, 143, 153, 154, 159, 163, 167, 168, 286, 293, 336. Luther, M., 142, 148–9, 150, 303, 327, 372 Luxemburg, R., 184 Machiavelli, N., 20, 72, 93–4, 110, 187, 203–4, 257, 283, 287, 347, 350, 354, 399, 412, 445 Maine de Biran, F. P., 23, 71, 297, 298, 376, 382 Mannheim, K., 262 Malebranche, N., 67, 69, 70, 72, 78, 79–81, 94, 152, 155, 166, 221, 296, 297, 315, 322, 325, 329, 331, 335, 340, 343, 344, 346, 347, 351, 352, 354, 356, 357, 367, 374–381, 387–418, 421, 432, 435, 440, 452, 471 Marcel, G., 12, 52–5, 106, 151, 248, 251–2 Marin-Sola, F., 60 Maritain, J., 26, 47, 58, 90, 151, 154, 158, 160, 272–3, 279, 292, 299–300, 328, 356, 420, 422, 431, 433–438, 440, 449, 455, 457, 461, 468, 470–1 Martin, A., see Ambrosius Victor. Martinetti, P., Marx, K., 4, 6, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 24–5, 27–8, 36, 38, 45, 50, 51, 60, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 83– 144, 153, 154, 156–7, 159, 160. 163–4, 168, 169–214, 215–236, 239, 243, 256, 260–271, 273, 274, 276, 280, 283, 286–7, 290– 3, 296, 299, 305, 306, 308–311, 312, 323, 336, 396, 419, 421,

32538_DelNoce.indd 480

437–8, 445–6, 451, 455–462, 464–5, 470, 472, 473 Masson, M., 298 Matteucci, N., 159 Maurras, C., 118 Mauthner, F., 49–50, 238 Mazzantini, C., 29, 31–2 Mazzini, G., 51, 82, 438, 472 Meinecke, F., 394 Meinvielle, J., 434 Merleau-Ponty, M., 21, 106, 114 Mersenne, M., 322, 355, 373, 380 Méry, M., 277 Mesnard, P., 340 Michelet, J., 296 Migliorini, B., 34 Mises, L. von, 430 Molina, L., 49, 366, 370, 383 Mondolfo, R., 154, 185, 182, 188, 189 Monnerot, J., 87, 107, 108, 109, 138, 242, 446 Montaigne, M., 303, 353, 382–3, 385 Mounier, E., 28, 160–1, 437, 456–7 Mouy, P., 277 Mucchielli, R., 256, 293 Muñoz, A., 141, 238 Mussolini, B., 116–120, 122, 453 Natorp, P., 202 Naudé, G., 242, 412 Naville, P., 312 Newman, J. H., 59 Nicole, P., 317, 357, 369 Nietzsche, F., 4, 6, 8–9, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23–4, 28, 39, 44, 45, 61, 64, 70, 72, 73, 82, 85, 95–6, 98, 102, 107, 123, 124, 139,

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Index of Names 481

140–153, 159, 168, 243, 246, 279, 280, 281, 283–5, 336, 455, 459, 460, 465, 473 Nigg, W., 56, 294 Nolte, E., 116

Prini, P., 12 Proudhon, P. J., 24, 36, 38, 102, 247, 273–277, 296

Olgiati, F., 393 Ollé-Laprune, L., 62, 155 Orcibal, J., 387 Ottaviano, C., 426

Rabelais, F., 18–9 Racine, J. B., 308 Rauh, F., 30 Ravà, A., 93 Ravaisson, J.–G.–F., 23 Reding, M., 35 Reid, T., 331, 332 Renouvier, C., 24, 29, 31, 37–40, 61, 71, 277, 278, 424 Rensi, G., 31, 40, 162 Riazanov, D., 181 Rimbaud, A., 156 Robespierre, M., 97, 288 Robinet, A., 346, 352, 393 Robinson, L., 405–6 Rodano, F., 255, 258, 259, 451, 467 Rosmini, A., 30, 80, 81, 82, 116, 322, 329, 343, 387, 404, 418–9, 425, 426, 449, 471 Rosselli, C., 189 Rossi, P., 129 Rousseau, J.-J., 9, 15, 19–20, 36, 38, 64, 104, 197, 246–7, 280, 288, 295–8, 338, 352, 382, 425 Rousselot, P., 421 Rubel, M., 103, 202 Ruge, A., 104 Russell, B., 325 Russier, J., 12, 302, 340, 346, 369, 380, 386, 388

Padovani, U. A., 41, 90 Panzini, A., 34 Paul (Saint), 303 Parain, B., 388 Pareto, V., 20, 107, 137 Pareyson, L., 159 Pascal, B., 4–5, 10, 12–3, 26, 42, 45, 61, 69, 70–3, 75, 78, 79–80, 84, 115, 140, 141, 144, 148, 150, 151, 155, 158, 166, 167–8, 221, 238, 245, 247, 251, 266, 284, 296, 297, 298, 302–5, 308–419, 439, 452, 455 Patri, A., 27 Pelagius, 338, 361 Péguy, C., 251, 276 Pètrement, S., 43 Pieper, J., 244 Piettre, A., 102 Pintard, R., 355, 395, 401 Piovani, P., 30, 425, 452 Plato, 6, 74, 344, 347, 398 Plekhanov, G., 20, 182, 312 Plotinus, 338 Podach, E. F., 8 Polin, R., 5, 420 Prat, L., 39 Preti, G., 171

32538_DelNoce.indd 481

Quinet, E., 296

Sade, A. F. de, 20, 77, 241, 288, 306, 460–1

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482

Index of Names

Saint-Cyran, J. Duvergier d’Hauranne, abbé de, 371 Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 141, 347 Saint-Martin, L. C. de, 61 Saint-Simon, C. H. de, 60–1, 263 Saisset, E., 381 Salvemini, G., 116 Sartre, J.-P., 21, 25–8, 83, 106, 114– 5, 279, 332, 345, 438, 467 Schaff, A., 27 Scheler, M., 32, 41, 61, 98, 141, 161, 280, 391, 453 Schelling, F. W. J., 12, 46, 61, 75, 85, 145, 146, 331 Schleiermacher, F., 46 Schmitt, C., 58, 240, 328, 434 Schopenhauer, A., 5, 14, 17, 19, 21–2, 28, 38–9, 44–6, 61, 64, 85, 95, 141, 144, 147, 194, 473 Schrecker, P., 375 Sciacca, M. F., 42, 150, 385, 387 Seneca, 305 Shestov, L., 25, 74, 98, 139, 145– 156, 332, 391, 462 Siegmund, G., 50 Socrates, 65, 147, 207, 305, 404 Solari, G., 42, 414 Solovev, V., 61, 145, 146 Sorel, G., 90, 111, 133, 189, 445, 452 Spaventa, B., 15, 20, 117, 193, 473 Spencer, H., 22, 239–240 Spengler, O., 279, 285 Spini, G., 14 Spinoza, B., 13, 14, 15–6, 17, 19, 20, 42, 44–5, 46, 65, 78, 87, 90, 93, 149, 151, 192, 267, 315, 332, 333, 335, 338, 342, 345, 355, 357, 392, 412, 416, 422, 443 Spir, A., 19, 22, 40, 46, 146, 155

32538_DelNoce.indd 482

Spirito, U., 34, 41, 48, 156, 157, 203, 405 Stalin, J., 85, 107, 109, 110, 124–7, 137, 138, 139, 142, 183, 216 Stirner, M., 21, 23–5, 105, 113, 150, 461, 462 Strauss, L., 29 Suarez, F., 49, 383 Taine, J., 79, 294, 352 Talleyrand, C. M., 91 Taparelli d’Azeglio, L., 30 Tarozzi, G., 381 Teilhard de Chardin, P., 33, 439– 440, 455, 457 Tertullian, 150 Thiers, A., 275 Thomas Aquinas (Saint), 7, 30, 71, 112, 144, 282, 338, 347, 370, 424, 432, 433, 436, 438, 439, 440, 458, 470 Tilgher, A., 38, 40, 265 Toffanin, G., 56, 383 Toynbee, A, 468 Treitschke, H. von, 445 Tresmontant, C., 30, 239 Trotsky, L., 107, 125–7, 137, 138, 183 Varisco, B., 41, 156 Vartanian, A., 68, 312, 359 Vernière, P., 14 Viano, C. A., 351 Vico, G. B., 41, 56, 67, 69, 72, 79, 81, 90–1, 96, 158, 166–8, 170, 285–6, 310, 321, 324–5, 329, 335, 343, 344, 346, 384, 392– 401, 404–418, 432, 433, 449, 452, 469–470, 472.

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Index of Names 483

Vleeschauwer, H. J. de, 404 Voegelin, E., 5 Volpe, G., 117 Voltaire, F. M., 4, 274, 278, 298 Vorländer, K., 154, 187, 190, 202

Weil, S., 307 Wetter, G., 451, 462 Wolf, C., 382–3 Zenkovsky, B., 145 Zuccante, G., 421

Wahl, J., 156, 210 Weber, M., 86, 129, 286

32538_DelNoce.indd 483

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32538_DelNoce.indd 484

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