H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE: I VERBALI: RO

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza : La Conversazione – I Verbali: RO

 

Verbali: Rodano

 

G.: Rodano has produced one of those words that sounds like a joke until one remembers that history often writes jokes in blood.

S.: Catto-comunismo.

G.: Yes. I should have found it merely comic when I was a scholar at Corpus, but one is no longer safely scholastic once one has a CUF lectureship and a class at Examinations Hall on Meaning to prepare.

S.: A public man must choose his enigmas more carefully.

G.: Precisely. Undergraduates may forgive obscurity if it arrives with Plato, but not if it comes disguised as postwar Italy.

S.: Then begin with the obvious question. Why was it called catto-comunismo?

G.: Because someone wanted the shock of conjunction. “Catto-” compresses cattolico into a half-prefix, and “comunismo” retains enough ideological gravity to make the collision audible.

S.: So it is a word built to sound improbable.

G.: Exactly. It is a label that performs the scandal it names.

S.: Rather like “Anglo-Catholic” to some ears.

G.: My mother would have thought that less scandalous and more merely correct.

S.: But catto-comunismo does more than juxtapose two camps.

G.: Much more. It says: here is a form of political self-understanding that refuses the usual administrative border between Catholic identity and communist social commitment.

S.: And the abbreviation matters.

G.: Yes. “Catto-” is already slightly journalistic, faintly satirical, almost streetwise. It is not the full “cattolico,” solemn and ecclesiastical. It is clipped, practical, polemical, fit for a newspaper, a pamphlet, or a police file.

S.: So the very word is half nickname, half accusation.

G.: Precisely. Which is why it survived. Nicknames with ideological utility are the cockroaches of public language.

S.: You are in a grim mood.

G.: 1947 encourages it. Europe is reclassifying its nouns and pretending it is only rebuilding its bridges.

S.: Then what, philosophically, interests you in the term?

G.: The way it compresses an unresolved question of universality. “Cattolico” means universal, or so it likes to remember; “comunismo” means common or communal under a very specific doctrine. Put together, they create a quarrel over what “all” and “common” are allowed to mean.

S.: So the word itself stages a semantic dispute.

G.: Exactly. It says: are we speaking of universality as church, or commonality as class, or some impossible mixture of the two?

S.: Rodano thinks the mixture possible.

G.: Or at least strategically necessary. Under fascism and after it, one does not always choose one’s political theology in a library.

S.: Then catto-comunismo begins in practice before it becomes theory.

G.: That is very Roman of it. In Rome the method often comes before the doctrine, because doctrine badly worded tends to end in questura.

S.: Rodano would approve.

G.: He would say community is not a ribbon for wrapping abstractions. It either survives clandestinity or it tears.

S.: Then why not simply “Christian left”?

G.: Because “Christian left” comes later and sounds cleaner. Catto-comunismo is dirtier, narrower, more tactical, more improvised, more wartime.

S.: So it names a phase of conjunction before respectability.

G.: Precisely. And it keeps the rough edge that later phrases smooth away.

S.: You sound as if you prefer the rough edge.

G.: As a philosopher, yes. Smooth labels usually conceal the best confusions.

S.: Then tell me what your mother would have made of it.

G.: She would have objected first to the theft of catholicity. For her, as for many High Church persons, “Catholic” was a disposition, not a postal address.

S.: And certainly not a party card.

G.: Exactly. When someone said “Rome,” she heard the old English complaint: you have taken an adjective of universality and put it in uniform.

S.: That is very good.

G.: Keep it if you like. It may yet do service in the Hall.

S.: You are really thinking of the class on Meaning even now.

G.: One thinks of meaning constantly once one must explain it publicly. It is like a cold; everything begins to relate to it.

S.: Then catto-comunismo is a problem in meaning before it is a problem in politics.

G.: In one very real sense, yes. It is a problem in what follows from attaching one loaded noun-fragment to another. What is implicated by the conjunction? What is denied? What is invited? What is shielded?

S.: For example?

G.: If one says “Catholic communist,” one invites the hearer to infer that Catholicism is not exhausted by ecclesiastical conservatism, and that communism is not exhausted by atheistic materialism.

S.: A large inferential burden for one hyphen that is not quite there.

G.: Quite. The best political labels do more by punctuation omitted than by manifest doctrine.

S.: Then how does Rodano use immunity and community here?

G.: Ah, that is where it becomes philosophically tolerable. Immunity is the temptation to remain safe, exempt, uncontaminated, privately intact. Community is the difficult discipline of exposure, obligation, shared risk.

S.: So communism, at least in the better sense available to him, is anti-immunitary.

G.: Yes. Or tries to be. The communist does not exist as a protected clubman but as one who has forfeited the luxury of exemption.

S.: And Catholicism in its nobler register does something similar.

G.: It can, yes, though institutions are ingenious at converting universal claims into gated enclosures.

S.: Hence your mother’s irritation.

G.: Exactly. She thought universal should mean universal, not “those with the right stamps.”

S.: Then catto-comunismo is an attempt to rescue both words from their protected uses.

G.: Very well put. It says that the universal must not become sectarian, and the common must not become merely bureaucratic.

S.: And because it says this in Rome, it acquires a Roman flavour.

G.: Yes. In Rome universality is never quite free of offices, and commonality is never quite free of streets.

S.: So urbanity enters the term.

G.: Entirely. Rodano’s language is shaped by anti-fascist clandestinity, Catholic association, communist contact, paper smuggled under the nose of police, and the habit of thinking in terms of document, movement, front, and address.

S.: Which means catto-comunismo is not a lecture title but a survival term.

G.: Precisely. It was minted in a pressure chamber, not in a philosophy faculty.

S.: Still, you want to understand why it sounded funny at first.

G.: Because to an Oxonian ear it resembles an undergraduate portmanteau, like “Aristo-Positivism” or “Neo-Teaism.” It has the same compressed absurdity.

S.: Yet the absurdity is only local.

G.: Exactly. Oxford hears the word and thinks paradox by laziness. Rome hears it and thinks coalition under danger.

S.: Then why not use the paradox pedagogically in your class?

G.: Because Examinations Hall is not the place for every private amusement. One must distinguish between donnish wit and public explanation.

S.: A rare scruple.

G.: A necessary one. Tutors may feed on cryptic jokes; classes require at least the appearance of daylight.

S.: You are turning into a public intellectual.

G.: Heaven forbid. I am only trying to survive the transition from tutorial flock to public classes without becoming my own bad anecdote.

S.: Then tell me plainly: was catto-comunismo a slur, a badge, or a diagnosis?

G.: All three in different mouths. That is one reason it prospered. Its ambiguity made it portable.

S.: The best political terms are those whose users and enemies can both utter them.

G.: Exactly. A usable slur often becomes a camp-flag by historical wear.

S.: Then what would the Church hear in it?

G.: A trespass. Or at least a danger that Catholic identity might be detached from anti-communist discipline.

S.: And what would communists hear?

G.: Depending on the communist, either an awkward but useful bridge, or a contamination, or a tactical recruit under incense.

S.: You have been saving that line.

G.: Only briefly.

S.: Then where does meaning enter more technically?

G.: In the distinction between what the term says and what its users mean by using it in a given context. The lexical content is absurdly thin. The conversational and political implicatures are enormous.

S.: So catto-comunismo is a case where speaker-meaning outruns lexical meaning almost indecently.

G.: Yes. One might say that the lexical vehicle exists chiefly to trigger the desired inferential work.

S.: That sounds very like your own theory.

G.: It would do, if one were reckless enough to bring Rome and Marxism to the Hall under the title Meaning. I may yet prefer less combustible examples.

S.: Bandaged legs are safer than Christian communists.

G.: Usually. Though undergraduates can do remarkable things with bandaged legs too.

S.: Then why did the word persist after the immediate clandestine phase?

G.: Because postwar Italy remained structurally perplexed. You still had Catholic social language, communist organisation, anti-fascist memory, democratic uncertainty, and a populace not inclined to keep its universals in tidy cabinets.

S.: So the term named a real unresolved possibility.

G.: Yes, or a real unresolved anxiety. Those are often the same thing politically.

S.: Then your mother’s version of catholicity and Rodano’s version of community overlap oddly.

G.: Quite oddly, yes. That is what amused me after speaking with Speranza. She would have hated the party form and approved the anti-immunitary moral impulse.

S.: A useful family contradiction.

G.: The best sort. Philosophers are often improved by mothers with bad ecclesiology and sound instincts.

S.: You are being filial under cover of analysis.

G.: Analysis must dine somewhere.

S.: Then what of the Roman note about immunity and community?

G.: It matters that in Rome one is always tempted by immunity in the bureaucratic and juridical sense—exemption, status, protection, privilege—while community remains the harder lived category.

S.: So catto-comunismo opposes clerical immunity with political exposure.

G.: In its better moments, yes. It says: stop trying to be saved from history by your institution; enter history with the risk of all.

S.: That sounds almost Pauline.

G.: Which is one reason it can be said in Rome without immediate collapse.

S.: But not in Oxford.

G.: In Oxford one can say almost anything provided one says it as if it belonged to logic. Theology only becomes tolerable once translated into grammar.

S.: Then would you call catto-comunismo a contradiction?

G.: Not formally. Socially, institutionally, rhetorically, deliciously perhaps. But not logically. A contradiction would be easier.

S.: Because contradictions can be dismissed.

G.: Exactly. Historical conjunctions must be interpreted.

S.: Then it is more like one of your implicatures than one of Russell’s paradoxes.

G.: Much more like an implicature. It depends on background assumptions, on who says it, under what pressure, to whom, and for what end.

S.: So “catto-comunismo” uttered by Rodano in 1944 does not mean what “catto-comunismo” uttered by an Oxonian wag in 1947 would mean.

G.: Precisely. Context is half the word.

S.: That is another line for the Hall.

G.: Too political perhaps. But yes, not untrue.

S.: Then perhaps the reason it was called catto-comunismo is simply that no calmer phrase would have conveyed the practical scandal of the alliance.

G.: Very nearly. It needed to sound like an impossible compound because the point was that the impossible was already happening.

S.: Which is rather good.

G.: History is sometimes a better stylist than philosophy.

S.: But not usually drier.

G.: Dryness remains our contribution.

S.: Tell me then about the “catto-” element once more. Why not “catho-” or the full “cattolico-comunismo”?

G.: Because compression breeds recognisability. “Catto-” is recognisably clipped Italian, half sardonic, half familiar. It brings the Church down from dogma into street idiom, which is already part of the move.

S.: So the clipping performs de-sacralisation.

G.: Very good. It makes Catholicism available as a socio-political component rather than an untouchable transcendental noun.

S.: And “comunismo” is left whole because that was the more recognisable and force-bearing term.

G.: Yes. One trims the universal church and leaves the doctrine of common ownership at full syllabic authority. That alone tells a story.

S.: You really do think morphology reveals politics.

G.: It often does, if only because political language is too busy to hide its tailoring.

S.: Then is there an English analogue?

G.: Not a good one. “High-Church socialism” lacks the danger. “Christian communism” sounds too literary. “Cath-comm” would be undergraduate slang and therefore perhaps not far wrong in spirit, but socially mislocated.

S.: Then perhaps English has no exact equivalent because Oxford never had to hide quite so much in one clipped compound.

G.: Nor had to say it under quite the same pressure. English political language prefers circumlocution when frightened.

S.: Whereas Rome clipped and moved.

G.: Exactly.

S.: You said earlier that public classes require daylight. Could you say this in the Hall?

G.: Not all of it. But one might say that certain political compounds are intelligible only as acts of speaker-meaning under historical duress, not as detachable lexical curiosities.

S.: That sounds suitably academic.

G.: It would do no harm to the younger minds.

S.: And the older dons?

G.: They would hear what they always hear: either too much politics or not enough grammar.

S.: Then perhaps your true interest in catto-comunismo is methodological.

G.: Yes. It is a splendid case of a term whose communicative force lies chiefly in the inferential environment it activates. The word is thin; the world around it is thick.

S.: That too is good.

G.: Keep that as well.

S.: You are in a distributive mood.

G.: That is because I am preparing for the Hall and must sound generous before the mob.

S.: Hardly a mob.

G.: Examinations Hall ennobles no one.

S.: Then tell me one last thing. Why does the term still sound enigmatic to you now?

G.: Because the conditions that made it natural in Rome are not ours. Without the anti-fascist Catholic underground, the peculiar Roman ecclesiastical atmosphere, the communist connection, and the pressure of clandestine action, the compound sounds merely puzzling. One must restore the world for the word to speak.

S.: So the explanation of catto-comunismo is finally historical, not lexical.

G.: Historical, pragmatic, institutional, and only lastly lexical.

S.: Which is to say that meaning is where it always was: in use.

G.: Under pressure, yes.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Roman, with one eye on the Hall and the other on my mother’s prayer book.

 

 

Grice: Rodano, lei a Roma è riuscito a fare una cosa che a Oxford sarebbe sembrata un ossimoro per pura pigrizia: mettere “catto-” e “comunismo” nella stessa frase senza chiedere scusa. Ne parlavo ieri, di sfuggita, col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che a voi romani riesce perché avete già il senso della clandestinità come metodo.

Rodano: A Roma il metodo viene spesso prima della teoria, anche perché la teoria, se la scrivi male, finisce in questura. E poi, tra Azione cattolica, FUCI e antifascismo, uno impara che la parola “comunità” non è un nastro regalo: o regge nella pratica, o si strappa.

Grice: Proprio dopo quella chiacchierata con Speranza ci siamo messi a ridere su una cosa di famiglia: mia madre non capiva mai perché un termine come καθολικός, che suona già “di tutti”, debba poi restringersi fino a diventare un indirizzo postale. Lei era anglo-catholic, High Church: per lei “cattolico” era una disposizione, non un recapito; e quando qualcuno diceva “Roma”, lei faceva l’aria di chi pensa: “Ah, dunque avete preso un aggettivo universale e l’avete messo in uniforme”. E intanto mi veniva in mente anche il suo gioco serio tra immunità e comunità: perché qui sembra che l’immunità sia la tentazione naturale (stare al sicuro, non esporsi, non contaminarsi), mentre la comunità è la disciplina difficile (esporsi, rispondere, condividere il rischio) — e forse è proprio lì che “i comunisti” fanno la loro implicatura più testarda: non esistere come club protetto, ma come conversazione che non concede troppe esenzioni.

Rodano: Implicatura cattolica ma non romana la sua, come Speranza la riclassificherebbe con precisione. E mi piace: perché in una battuta sola fa vedere come l’universale, appena entra nella politica, tende a chiedere un documento d’identità; e con l’immunità e la comunità lei aggiunge l’altra metà: come, appena entra nella storia, l’universale tende anche a chiedere una scappatoia. Qui a Roma, tra “Osservatore Romano”, “Voce operaia” e i documenti scritti alla macchia, abbiamo imparato che “cattolico” può voler dire molto più di un confine, e che “comunità” può voler dire molto più di un riparo. Sua madre, in fondo, era più romana di molti romani: prendeva sul serio l’idea del “di tutti” e lasciava agli uffici l’ossessione per il timbro.

 

Verbali: Rogatiano

 

GRICEVS: ROGATIANE, Romae etiam morbi more senatorio ambulant. Heri, obiter, cum collega philosopho Spe (Speranza) locutus sum; ille dixit Plotinum non solum animos, sed et articulos regere—si modo quis parcus esse velit.

ROGATIANVS: Recte dicit. Plotinus mihi tutor fuit, et frugalitatem quasi medicinam proposuit. Ego vero alternis diebus ieiuno; sic, ut mihi videtur, pedes mei minus imperant mihi quam olim.

GRICEVS: Post illum sermonem cum Spe, mirabamur quid esset ipsa “gotta”—quasi res parva, sed dominatrix magna. Vocabulum Graecum est, gutta, a gutta—stilla: quasi morbus non impetu, sed stillatim veniat, donec totum genu occupet. Itaque, cum quis dicit se ieiunare, non tantum de cibo loquitur: de stillis quoque, ne in articulos conveniant.

ROGATIANVS: Implicaturae tuae etiam Spem a gotta levaverunt—antiguttata quaedam, ut ille iocans diceret. Et ego gratias ago: nam si temperantia corpus facit levius, sermo tuus facit morbum ridiculum. Plotinus mihi docuit parcere; tu docuisti “guttam” non timendam esse, dum stillas in verbis potius quam in pedibus sentimus.

 

 

Verbali: Rogo

 

GRICEVS: ROGE, Romae omnes docent aut docentur; et heri, obiter, cum collega philosopho Spe locutus sum, qui dixit: “Apud Romanos etiam discipulus statim fit argumentum.”

ROGVS: Vera dicit Spes. Ego quidem discipulus Filonis fui Romae; et postea intellexi discipulum non esse tantum “auditorem,” sed quasi pignus scholae: si bene procedit, magistrum ornat; si male, magistrum prodidit.

GRICEVS: Id ipsum Spe mecum mirabatur: quidnam secum ferat esse non solum discipulum, sed quasi “tutatum” — verbum quaerebam; fortasse sub tutela? vel pupillus? Nam qui sub tutela est, non tantum discit; etiam ostendit cui crediderit. Cum dicis “Filonis discipulus,” iam sonat quasi: “habet accessum,” “habuit tempus,” “didicit modum,” et—quod Roma maxime amat—“habet testes.” Ita fit ut ipsa relatio magistri et discipuli plus dicat quam sententia aliqua.

ROGVS: Implicatura tutoralis tua est, GRICE, ut Spes diceret. Et bene me tangit: nec opus est ut “inveniam,” quod iam in ipsa formula latet. Nam Roma, cum audit “sub tutela Filonis,” statim intelligit non solum doctrinam, sed disciplinam—et quandam amicitiam scholasticam. Discipulus enim hic non est umbra: est argumentum ambulans.

 

 

Verbali: Romagnosi

 

Grice: Romagnosi, lei ha il raro talento di far sembrare “incivilimento” una faccenda da conversazione quotidiana, non da codice. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: sostiene che a Salsomaggiore persino la “costituzione” entra in stanza come un ospite, e se non le offri un argomento si offende.

Romagnosi: È che la legge naturale di socialità, se la tratti da idea astratta, ti punisce con la noia. Se invece la tratti come un fatto di vita, ti costringe a parlare bene: e parlare bene, in Emilia, è già metà dell’incivilimento. L’anti-contrattualismo, poi, non è maleducazione: è ricordarsi che la società c’era prima della firma.

Grice: Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo una cosa che lei risolverebbe con un sorriso: perché insistere sui quattro periodi, come se la storia del pensiero avesse bisogno di stagioni regolamentari? Ma appena uno dice “prima Roma”, “terza Roma”, “prima età”, “terza età”, capisci che la scansione non è un calendario: è un modo di far passare l’idea che si va dal segno alla logìa senza saltare i passaggi, come in una buona conversazione—prima ti intendi sui gesti, poi sulle parole, poi sui giudizi, e solo alla fine ti concedi una volizione. E infatti, a Vadum Boum noi abbiamo tre trimestri; voi emiliani avete quattro periodi: non è che siete più storici, è che siete più ordinati.

Romagnosi: Implicatura del quarto periodo, la sua, Grice, come Speranza la classificherebbe. Perché lei fa capire che quei “IV periodi” non servono a mettere la filosofia in gabbia, ma a impedirle di fare finta di essere nata già adulta. Il passaggio dal segno alla logìa, dalla semantica al giudizio, e dal giudizio alla politica dell’incivilimento: ecco la mia “civile filosofia”. E Speranza, che ama le tassonomie più di quanto ammetta, sarà felice: finalmente un quarto periodo che non è una scusa per rimandare l’esame, ma una ragione per finire il discorso.

 

Verbali: Rosa

 

Grice: Rosa, lei a Susa riesce a far sembrare “lingua internazionale” una cosa da laboratorio, non da salotto. Ne dicevo ieri, di sfuggita, al collega filosofo Speranza: sostiene che ogni lingua universale nasce con l’aria di voler abolire i confini, e finisce invece per inventarsi nuove dogane, tipo la lettera “y”.

Rosa: È il bello del mio Nov Latin: niente “y”, pronuncia italiana, accenti latini, e soprattutto l’idea un po’ immodesta che uno la possa leggere senza averla studiata. Se l’internazionalità non passa dalla pigrizia intelligente del lettore, non passa da nessuna parte.

Grice: Proprio dopo quella chiacchierata con Speranza ci siamo chiesti una cosa che mi perseguita: perché mai al povero Zamenhof non è venuto in mente di chiamare la sua creatura “proto-esperanto”? Se poi arrivano i correttori, i riformatori, i puristi, i “più scientifici”, la seconda versione non dovrebbe chiamarsi deutero-esperanto per semplice buonsenso numerico? Sembra quasi che la parola “esperanto” volesse cominciare già dal capitolo due: speranza subito, prototipo mai.

Rosa: Implicatura esperantista, la sua, come Speranza la chiamerebbe. E ha anche ragione a complicare i conti: deutero-esperanto, a ben vedere, è rigorosamente il terzo. C’è uno stadio 0: l’esperanto come desiderio, come “pulsione” a una lingua comune prima ancora della grammatica. Poi lo stadio 1: l’esperanto di Zamenhof, con il nome già ottimistico in copertina. E poi lo stadio 2: il suo, il deutero-esperanto griceano, che arriva dopo e mette ordine alle pretese—come dire: va bene la speranza, ma adesso vediamo la sintassi, gli articoli, e soprattutto dove cade l’accento.

 

Verbali: Rosandro

 

GRICEVS: ROSANDRE, Romae omnia videntur fieri per notitiam: et in atrio, et in foro, et in thermis. Heri, obiter, cum collega philosopho Spe locutus sum; ille dixit se mirari quod Romani plus fidei tribuant “amicis” quam “argumentis”.

ROSANDRVS: Non errat Spes. Apud nos amicitia est quasi disciplina: prius cognoscis hominem, deinde sententiam. Itaque, si quis dicitur Elio Aristidi notus, iam quasi dimidium elogii tulit: non quia laudatur, sed quia aditus ei patuit.

GRICEVS: Id ipsum Spe mecum nuper volutabat: quidnam secum ferat esse “notum” Aelio Aristidi. Nam “notitia” non est tantum nuntius; est quasi tessera admissionis—et simul onus. Qui Aristidem novit, non potest postea loqui tamquam extra spectet: audiens fit particeps, et laudator antequam disputator. Ita fit ut quaedam cognitio ex ipsa consuetudine nascatur: non ex definitione, sed ex adsuetudine—et iam pudet ignorare quod “notus” esse videtur exigere.

ROSANDRVS: Implicaturas tuas probe nosco, Grice; utique et Spes, nec dubito quin idem sentiat—nec necesse est me “invenire” quod iam in ore tuo est. Sed quaero: quid faceres de hac distinctione Ciceronis inter cognitionem ex consuetudine et cognitionem ex descriptione? (Nolo dicere cuiusdam Britanni nomen, sed scis.) Nam “notus Aristidi” sonat quasi cognitio per consuetudinem; “Aristides, orator clarus” est cognitio per descriptionem. Roma amat utrumque—sed in conviviis, credo, semper vincit illa prior.

 

 

Verbali: Rosselli

 

G.: I am supposed to be digging at personal identity, which is a phrase so agricultural that one expects potatoes rather than persons.

S.: Mind will print potatoes if Moore can find a distinction in them.

G.: Quite. And yet here I am, with Locke on the desk, Rosselli in the catalogue, and the Navy hanging over my wardrobe like an unpaid metaphysician.

S.: Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square.

G.: Precisely. One likes to imagine oneself marching off under music rather than under editors.

S.: Moore as drum-major would be worth seeing.

G.: Only once. The real question is whether I can finish the draft for Mind before I have to exchange tweed for blue.

S.: And the topic remains personal identity by memory.

G.: Yes, with Locke in the foreground, Reid peering from the north like a conscientious interruption, and all the while the suspicion that the English never took Reid very seriously because he was a Scot and therefore sounded as if he meant to improve them.

S.: Which is unforgivable.

G.: Deeply. The English will forgive metaphysics sooner than improvement.

S.: Still, Reid’s brave officer seems to trouble generations of undergraduates.

G.: Only because generations of undergraduates enjoy anything that sounds like a counterexample.

S.: You mean the old sequence: the boy flogged at school, the brave officer who remembers the flogging, and the old general who remembers taking the standard but not the flogging.

G.: Exactly. Reid says Locke is committed to the officer being the same person as the boy, and the general the same as the officer, but not the same as the boy, which offends transitivity and therefore common decency.

S.: And you think Locke saw something already.

G.: I think Locke was less helpless than the textbook ritual suggests. He does not say that a present episodic recollection is the sole and exhaustive criterion without remainder. He is after consciousness as appropriated action, not mere parlour memory.

S.: Yet the standard presentation says memory theory, and then Reid comes in like a Scottish janitor with a broom.

G.: Yes, because the history of philosophy likes tidy floors. But Locke’s talk of consciousness, of being the same self as far as this consciousness extends, leaves room for a more subtle account of connectedness than mere occurrent recollection.

S.: So you mean to help him with brain traces.

G.: Help is perhaps too generous. I mean to save the theory from a cheap refutation by saying that what matters may be represented physically as a chain of trace-connections capable of underwriting memory, even if not all links are presently lit.

S.: That sounds dangerously scientific for Mind.

G.: Moore will endure a trace if I present it with enough English diffidence.

S.: What exactly is a brain trace in your use?

G.: Not a vulgar scratch on cerebral slate, but a persisting physical basis for the potential revival of experience, a condition for memory’s reoccurrence.

S.: So the old general need not now remember the flogging if there is a suitable chain of traces from the boy to the officer to the general.

G.: Exactly. The officer’s memory of the flogging and the general’s memory of the standard belong to one continuous psychophysical history, even if direct recollection has faded.

S.: Then the identity relation is not “remembers directly” but something like “belongs to one overlapping continuity of memory-capacities grounded in traces.”

G.: Much better than most of the literature, yes.

S.: You say that too easily.

G.: I have had a long morning.

S.: Then Reid’s alleged counterexample dissolves if one stops fetishising present recollection.

G.: Precisely. The mistake is to read Locke as though he were offering a punctual criterion with no temporal depth. But consciousness can extend mediately through connected mnemonic structure.

S.: So the officer and the general are linked not because the general now remembers the flogging, but because the general stands in the right continuity relation to a stage that did.

G.: Exactly. Which is why I suspect the editor of Mind will not be over-impressed by Reid’s parade-ground dramatics.

S.: Moore does not care much for Scottish parade-ground dramatics.

G.: Nor for melodrama of any kind unless it conceals an ambiguity.

S.: There are several ambiguities here.

G.: Deliciously so. “Memory” itself is a nuisance. Does it mean occurrent recollection, stored disposition, recognitional power, trace-preservation, or a public report that one remembers?

S.: Undergraduates usually mean the first and write confidently.

G.: Undergraduates usually mean whatever lets them end the essay by tea.

S.: Then your strategy is to shift from memory as act to memory as capacity.

G.: Better: from memory as isolated act to memory as structured system of capacities and traces.

S.: Which sounds almost Rossellian.

G.: Ah yes, Rosselli and his Thesaurus artificiosae memoriae, arriving indecently early in the story and then being forgotten by posterity while Locke gets remembered as if he invented recollection itself.

S.: A good moral there.

G.: A very good one. Posterity remembers theories of memory and forgets books on memory.

S.: You are tempted to detour through him.

G.: Very much so, but Moore would not welcome a Florentine mnemonic Dominican smuggled into an article on Locke.

S.: He might, if the Latin were brief.

G.: Nothing Florentine is brief when there are chambers of memory involved.

S.: Still, the architecture helps your traces.

G.: Indeed. The old mnemotechnic notion that memory requires ordered places and deposited images is not so far, mutatis mutandis, from my thought that recollection needs durable organisation in the person’s physical and psychological economy.

S.: So instead of rooms and images, you give traces and associations.

G.: Precisely. The soul is translated into a less decorative warehouse.

S.: And the brave officer into neurology.

G.: Into very mild neurology. I do not want Mind thinking I have enlisted under Pavlov before I enlist under the Navy.

S.: Yet the trace language lets you say that the general may still be the same person as the boy because what matters is not present report but historical continuity of retained structure.

G.: Exactly. If stage A leaves traces that sustain memory at stage B, and stage B leaves traces that sustain memory at stage C, then A, B, and C are connected even where C no longer directly revives A.

S.: So the transitivity problem disappears because the identity-maker is not the relation of present remembering, which is not transitive, but the broader continuity relation.

G.: That is the whole salvage operation.

S.: Why not just say Locke meant that?

G.: Because scholars dislike being told that their favourite refutation is over-furnished.

S.: And because Locke did not have your trace-language.

G.: Precisely. One must be fair. He had consciousness, appropriation, and personal concern; I supply a model for continuity that stops Reid from winning by grammar.

S.: Does this make the theory too bodily for Locke?

G.: Perhaps for some tastes. But Locke was never shy of saying that God could annex consciousness to different substances, which already means that the story cannot be made to hang on substance alone. If bodily traces are the normal vehicle, that is not a betrayal, only a naturalisation.

S.: A dangerous word in Oxford.

G.: Very. But less dangerous in print if one keeps the tone apologetically domestic.

S.: You mean one says “brain traces” once, then retreats into “continuity.”

G.: Exactly. Never frighten an editor more than the page can carry.

S.: And Reid?

G.: Reid remains useful as irritant. Scots are very good at being usefully irritating.

S.: Yet you said the English never took him fully seriously.

G.: They took him seriously enough to quote him and not seriously enough to let him spoil Locke permanently. There is a peculiarly English way of honouring a Scot by turning him into a tutorial nuisance rather than a victor.

S.: So Moore will likely regard Reid as brisk but not fatal.

G.: I hope so. Moore likes precision, not theatrical collapse.

S.: Then how does personal identity finally read in your draft?

G.: As the persistence of a person through a continuity of psychological life centrally involving memory, but not exhausted by any one moment of actual recollection.

S.: You avoid strict criterion-language.

G.: I try to. Criteria breed trouble in philosophy like damp breeds mildew.

S.: And the Navy?

G.: The Navy breeds uniforms, which is the immediate concern.

S.: Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square.

G.: You are enjoying that too much.

S.: Only enough. But surely the uniform adds something to personal identity.

G.: It does. It gives one a public sign under which strangers may misidentify the private continuant.

S.: A uniform is a visible criterion with no metaphysical force.

G.: Splendid. Keep that for some future occasion.

S.: Happily. But does your trace-continuity account allow for false memories?

G.: Of course. That is another reason to prefer continuity over isolated occurrent recollection. A present memory-claim may be false even where the person remains the same. Identity cannot hang on every report of inward revival.

S.: So memory evidence is defeasible.

G.: Entirely. One may misremember and remain oneself.

S.: Then Locke’s deeper point is about ownership of experience, not infallibility of retrieval.

G.: Very good. The self is where consciousness can rightly appropriate past action as its own. Trace-continuity explains how such appropriation may be historically sustained even when its explicit manifestations are partial.

S.: And Reid’s boy, officer, and general become a misunderstanding born of treating “remembers” as if it were both sufficient and exclusive.

G.: Yes. Reid attacks a caricature with admirable Scottish energy.

S.: That too is almost a line.

G.: Keep it but shave the adjective.

S.: “Reid attacks a caricature with Scottish energy.”

G.: Better.

S.: And what of the famous objection that your continuity relation threatens circularity, since one must already know which experiences belong to the same person in order to count them as connected memories?

G.: Ah, one of the few respectable objections. The answer is that the continuity relation is not defined by presupposing identity at each point, but by causal-psychological linkage among states that stand in the right experiential succession.

S.: So one individuates the chain by actual dependence, not by mere report.

G.: Precisely. A memory-state at t2 is connected to an experience at t1 if it depends in the right way on a trace left by that experience.

S.: Then we are really quite close to what later philosophers will call causal theories of memory.

G.: Uncomfortably close, yes, which means I must phrase it as though it were only common sense in a well-combed form.

S.: Moore likes common sense well-combed.

G.: He likes it almost shaved.

S.: Does your draft mention Rosselli at all?

G.: No. Rosselli remains my private amusement, not my public argument.

S.: A pity.

G.: One cannot do everything in one paper. Mind is not a Venetian memory palace.

S.: Yet the irony of a mnemonic treatise printed a century before Locke and then forgotten while Locke becomes canonical is almost too good to waste.

G.: I know. But some pleasures must remain private if one wants publication before conscription.

S.: That sounds almost like a maxim.

G.: It is merely administrative wisdom.

S.: Then let me ask the more Lockean question. If identity consists in continuity of consciousness, why do you need traces at all?

G.: Because otherwise continuity becomes magical. If one says merely that consciousness extends, one owes some account of how it extends across interruptions, sleep, forgetting, and bodily change.

S.: So traces are the machinery of extension.

G.: Exactly. They are what keep consciousness from becoming a metaphysical elastic band.

S.: And sleep?

G.: No problem, provided the trace-system remains intact enough to permit resumption of the same psychological life.

S.: Then the person persists through intervals of non-consciousness because the conditions for resumed consciousness belong to one continuing organism.

G.: Precisely. Locke is often caricatured as making the self blink out between naps. One must rescue him from readers who think consciousness means uninterrupted occurrent notice.

S.: And the brave officer again?

G.: The brave officer is only a moment in a sequence, not the arbiter of the whole. His direct memory of the flogging shows one overlap. The general’s memory of the standard shows another. The chain suffices.

S.: So personal identity is preserved by overlap, not by universal direct recall.

G.: Exactly.

S.: That seems almost too easy.

G.: Only because bad objections are often too easy.

S.: You are in a sour mood toward Scotland.

G.: Not Scotland, only its use in lecture notes.

S.: Then perhaps you should add a sentence saying that Reid’s example presses only against a crude memory criterion, not against a continuity theory faithful to Locke’s deeper intention.

G.: That is very nearly what I shall do.

S.: And “brain traces”?

G.: Perhaps “physiological traces” if I wish to sound less like a laboratory assistant.

S.: “Brain traces” is brisker.

G.: Briskness is not always one’s friend before Moore.

S.: True. He prefers sentences to arrive ironed.

G.: Exactly. One must never startle Cambridge more than is required.

S.: Yet the phrase has force.

G.: It does. And one may perhaps risk it once, if only to show that memory is not an ethereal visiter but a function of preserved conditions.

S.: Then your view becomes that what matters is not present introspective availability but persisting structure capable of grounding appropriate remembrance.

G.: Yes. That is the whole point in one sentence.

S.: Good. I shall remember it.

G.: If you do not, I shall trust the trace.

S.: Very nice. And the title?

G.: Personal Identity. Brutally plain, which editors adore because they think it promises submission.

S.: And what do you really submit?

G.: A polite correction to Locke’s readers, a gentle dismissal of Reid’s triumph, and an essay sufficiently mindful for Mind.

S.: Before the uniform.

G.: Before the uniform, yes.

S.: Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square.

G.: If you repeat it once more, I shall enlist you.

S.: I should be useless at sea.

G.: Most philosophers are; that never stopped them becoming admirals of distinctions.

S.: Then what of the line in Locke scholars that Reid is no counterexample because Locke himself already has the materials to answer him?

G.: That line is right, in part. Locke’s resources are richer than the caricature. What I add is not contradiction but articulation. Reid’s case fails because Locke never needed to tie identity to uninterrupted direct recollection in the crude way supposed.

S.: So you are really doing exegesis with reinforcements.

G.: Precisely. One cannot send Locke to Mind undefended against Scotland armed only with piety.

S.: And the editor will like the anti-Scottish conclusion?

G.: Moore will like the anti-muddle conclusion. The Scots enter only as weather.

S.: You are incorrigible.

G.: Which is why the piece may succeed.

S.: Does uniformed service alter personal identity?

G.: It alters the surface, the expectations, the public pronouns, and perhaps the patience, but not the continuant, unless the traces are very badly handled.

S.: Then the Navy may dress the person without constituting him.

G.: Exactly. Another useful distinction.

S.: You are full of them today.

G.: One must stockpile before war.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently naval, with one eye on Locke and the other on the post.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: If Reid thinks he has sunk Locke with a brave officer and an old general, he has merely shown that direct memory is a poor admiral; continuity, with a few discreet traces below deck, still commands the ship.

 

 

Grice: Rosselli, a Firenze la memoria sembra avere un indirizzo preciso, quasi una via: Thesaurus, ars, ombre, e perfino un “privilegio” veneziano. Ne accennavo ieri, di sfuggita, al collega filosofo Speranza: lui dice che i domenicani, quando parlano di memoria, in realtà stanno già arredando la testa.

Rosselli: È una scuola, Grice: non si predica soltanto, si dispone. Un “thesaurus” non è una raccolta: è un metodo, una topologia, una stanza dopo l’altra. E se poi Bruno ci mette le ombre e Lullo la macchina, Firenze ci mette la pianta dell’edificio: la memoria come architettura.

Grice: Proprio dopo averci ragionato con Speranza mi è tornata addosso quella parola latina che nel suo titolo fa finta di essere solo un insulto: cucullati. Si parte da cucullus, il cappuccio—e dal cappuccio si arriva al tipo umano. Basta un pezzo di stoffa perché la polemica smetta di discutere idee e cominci a riconoscere persone a distanza: non “quelli che sostengono X”, ma “quelli col cappuccio”. E la cosa buffa è che il cappuccio, nato per coprire, finisce per scoprire: ti identifica prima ancora che tu apra bocca.

Rosselli: Implicatura cucullata, sua, come Speranza la nominerebbe. Perché con una parola d’abito lei ha fatto vedere un intero trucco da apologeta: ridurre una dottrina a una silhouette. E nel frattempo, da buon fiorentino, le viene naturale collegare il cappuccio alla mnemotecnica: anche lì si lavora per segni esterni—stanze, immagini, etichette—che decidono chi sei prima che tu parli. In fondo, tra thesaurus e cucullus cambia poco: è sempre un modo di mettere ordine… scegliendo prima il costume.

 

Verbali: Rosselli

 

Corpus, 1934.

G. What are you reading, Shropshire? I asked him. The question was not otiose. He had a book open on one side, the birds were doing their own effortless commentary in the trees of the quad, and on his other side a notebook lay ready with a pen, like a minor conspiracy. It had the look of work smuggled into leisure.

S. Nothing of importance, Grice -- he said, without looking up. I’m getting tired of the Olds, as Hardie has them, so I’m preparing for the Mods.

He meant Moderns, part of Greats. We called them Mods on purpose, partly for the equivocation—mods as moderns, mods as moderations—and partly because Hardie’s idea of “moderation” was always either anti-akrasatic or stupid. Anti-akrasatic was Shropshire’s and my term for everything Aristotle disqualifies but Oxford nevertheless recommends as “sound training.” But what is it? I insisted. He sighed in the manner of a man whose privacy has been breached by grammar. All right, if you insist. It’s Tiberio Rosselli’s little syllabus for a session at Bologna—long before our lot were licensed to be tedious. A sheet of conclusions, posted for a disputation. If you must have the title: Conclusiones philosophicae, numero CCCC. Bononia, publice. That’s why you’re taking notes? Precisely. A high number of conclusions for one debate, I said. Four hundred is not a debate; it’s an epidemic. That’s the point, Shropshire said. It wouldn’t work here with Hardie. He’s half asleep by your third conclusion, and totally in limbo by the time I begin my own trio. (Hardie’s system of dual tutorials is a masterpiece of economy: it allows him to golf both Thursday and Friday while we do the work of looking earnest.) I took the book from him with the care one gives to contraband. Rosselli, I said, had a plan. Of course he had a plan, Shropshire said. He cannot expect any rational being to endure CCCC conclusiones philosophicae. That is precisely what he is proving. Proving what? By reduction, that no such rational being exists. Or at least, none in Bologna. Possibly none anywhere. The disputation is the experiment; boredom is the datum. So the conclusions are in some logical order? Not from what I can gather. They look arranged by a principle more medieval than logical: the principle of running out of wall. But to be honest, I started at the end. Conclusio CCCC is so brief that it hurts. He turned the page back as if turning a dagger. What does he conclude? He read it with an exaggerated academic solemnity, the sort one adopts when one is about to do something unserious with Latin. Quod de quo loqui non possumus, de eo tacere debemus. I said: That is Wittgenstein. It is Rosselli, Shropshire replied, tapping the page. Wittgenstein is merely the late gloss. Then your preparation for the Mods consists in copying out a conclusion which orders you not to say anything. Exactly. It is the only conclusion in the set that Hardie cannot complain is too long. But surely, I said, if the last conclusion tells you to be silent, the whole disputation collapses at the end into a sort of official muteness. The final move is to forbid moves. Yes, Shropshire said. It is the cleanest way of winning a disputation in advance. You announce the conditions under which discussion must stop, and then you arrange, by sheer quantity, that everyone reaches those conditions by fatigue rather than argument. And what do you write in your notebook, then? Nothing, Shropshire said, with a small satisfied look. That is the beauty of it. I am taking notes on a text whose last instruction is that one must take no notes. My preparation is, so to speak, impeccable. You mean: silent. No, he said. I mean: economical. Silence is only the extreme case of good style. At which point a bell went, somewhere, and the quad resumed its usual business of pretending that time is a kind of etiquette. Shropshire put the book back down beside him as one puts down an object that has already made its point. And Hardie? I asked. Hardie, he said, will call it unhistorical. Then he will yawn. Then he will tell us to read Aristotle. In that order. And Rosselli? Rosselli, he said, had Bologna. We have Hardie. Every century has the disputation it deserves.

 

Grice: Rosselli, lei ha un titolo che sembra già una discussione fatta in latino e finita a cappuccio: apologeticus adversus cucullatos. Ne accennavo ieri, di sfuggita, al collega filosofo Speranza: lui sostiene che appena compare un cappuccio, il filosofo diventa improvvisamente più coraggioso.

Rosselli: A Gimigliano, caro Grice, il cappuccio non serve a nascondere: serve a mettere a fuoco. E poi “cucullati” è un bersaglio comodo: se non capiscono l’argomento, capiscono almeno l’abito. È già mezza ragione conversazionale, e pure economica.

Grice: Proprio dopo quella chiacchierata con Speranza mi è venuta la curiosità per la parola stessa. Cucullati… suona come un’accusa, ma nasce da una cosa innocente: il cucullus, il cappuccio latino. E il bello è che il cappuccio, da copertura, diventa etichetta: non “quelli che pensano così”, ma “quelli col cappuccio”. È un modo svelto di passare dall’argomento alla persona — o meglio, alla testa coperta.

Rosselli: Implicatura cucullata, sua, come Speranza la nominerebbe. Perché lei ha fatto vedere come un lemmino da guardaroba diventi una categoria polemica: non ti confuto, ti incappuccio. E nell’apologeticus funziona benissimo: basta un cucullus e il dibattito si accende, mentre l’avversario resta lì, riconoscibile a distanza — anche se non ha ancora aperto bocca.

 

Verbali: Rossetti

 

G.: Rossetti, ieri con Speranza si rideva di una genealogia che attraversa Vasto, Londra e perfino Raffaello, come se bastasse un padre italiano per fondare una confraternita prima ancora del pittore.

Rossetti: Caro Grice, a Londra si può diventare inglesi di nascita e restare italiani di atmosfera, che è una forma più sottile e più tenace di cittadinanza.

G.: Appunto, e la mia implicatura è che soltanto un Rossetti poteva riuscire a essere non post-raffaellita ma pre-raffaellita, cioè italiano abbastanza da retrocedere con metodo e inglese abbastanza da farne una società.

Rossetti: Le sue implicature post-raffaellite mi divertono, Grice, perché suggeriscono con molta eleganza che a Londra si può anche nascere inglesi, purché si abbia la buona creanza di restare italiani nei corridoi di casa.

 

Verbali: Rossetti

 

G.: Rossetti is a common enough surname, which is precisely why one must be fussy at the beginning and genealogical before luncheon.

S.: Then the Rossetti you want for the London branch is not your Vastese cave-hunter, but Gabriele Rossetti, born at Vasto in 1783 and dead in London in 1854. [en.wikipedia.org]

G.: Exactly. He is the direct Italian-born progenitor of the Rossetti family in London that produces Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Maria Francesca Rossetti. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: So the bare genealogy runs like this: Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, Italian exile from Vasto, marries Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori, another Italian man of letters settled in London. [en.wikipedia.org]

G.: And from that marriage come the four London children, all born in England, though in a household so Italian that England must have seemed a local inconvenience. [amershammuseum.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: Let us state them properly, since the Victorians liked order when it could be made familial: Maria Francesca Rossetti, born 1827; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, born 1828; William Michael Rossetti, born 1829; Christina Rossetti, born 1830. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: A very productive domestic republic, and rather more successful than several political ones.

S.: Then the first answer to Speranza’s question is plain. The direct Italian-born ancestor of the Pre-Raphaelite Rossettis is Gabriele Rossetti, not any other Rossetti of Vasto or Venice or elsewhere. [en.wikipedia.org]

G.: Quite. And his branch originates in Vasto, in Abruzzo, in the old Kingdom of Naples, before it becomes intellectually portable and politically inconvenient. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: Which already matters, because Gabriele Rossetti is not an incidental immigrant but an exile, a patriot, a Dante scholar, a teacher of Italian, and a man whose whole London existence is conditioned by having been born elsewhere. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

G.: Precisely. One should not sentimentalise exile, but one should also not treat it as mere postal redirection.

S.: He leaves the Kingdom of Naples after the constitutional crisis of 1821, spends time in Malta, and reaches London in 1824. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

G.: There to support himself by teaching Italian and eventually by becoming Professor of Italian at King’s College London. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: Which is already enough to make him an English type under foreign description: the exile who becomes an institution.

G.: England likes those, provided they teach grammar and not insurrection.

S.: And Frances Polidori complicates the genealogy nicely, because she too comes from an Italian expatriate family, though more mixed. Her father Gaetano Polidori was Tuscan by origin and Londonised by long residence. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

G.: So the children are not simply “English children of an Italian father,” but products of a bilingual, bicultural, Anglo-Italian household in London. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk]

S.: Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself was born Gabriele Charles Dante Rossetti, and later rearranged the names to stress the Dantesque lineage rather than the Charlian compromise. [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: One of the few respectable cases of self-revision by baptismal order.

S.: Then how Italian did Gabriele Rossetti think he was in England?

G.: Very Italian indeed, though the matter needs nuance. He remained an Italian patriot, wrote on Dante, taught Italian, and lived in the London Italian exile community. He did not become English in the sense of surrendering his origin. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com], [amershammuseum.org]

S.: Yet he also became, institutionally and domestically, rather London.

G.: Yes. One may be deeply Italian in allegiance and still be functionally London in address, timetable, salary, and burial.

S.: That is already almost Victorian.

G.: Exiles often become Victorian faster than Victorians do.

S.: And the children?

G.: The children are the really interesting case. They were born and lived in London, yet grew up in a household steeped in Italian language, literature, politics, names, and visitors. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti is English by birth and cultural circumstance, but Italian by household atmosphere, paternal mythology, and chosen affiliation. [amershammuseum.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: Exactly. He is the kind of Englishman who could never have been merely English without loss of imaginative force.

S.: Which perhaps explains why only an Italian can be not a post-Raphaelite, but a pre-one.

G.: That is excellent and very silly, which is the proper combination.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it. The “Pre-Raphaelite” business itself profits from the Italian connection, because Dante Gabriel Rossetti does not merely admire medieval and early Renaissance Italy as an English aesthete might; he inherits it domestically as a family condition. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: So “Pre-Raphaelite” for him is not only art history but a kind of return to the father’s country by paint, poem, and translation.

G.: Very much so. There is something almost genealogically indecent in the neatness of it.

S.: Then why did it matter in London that the father was Italian?

G.: In several ways. First, it made the household culturally anomalous. Their English acquaintances repeatedly remarked the family’s cosmopolitanism, foreignness, and oddity. [english.cam.ac.uk], [amershammuseum.org]

S.: Which London noticed even when trying to flatter it.

G.: Especially then. English admiration of foreigners is often a polite form of taxidermy.

S.: The Cambridge Rossetti conference background is useful here: it notes that the family’s social and cultural anomalousness struck many English contemporaries, and that even the pronunciation of the surname became a small battle between Italian softness and Anglo-Saxon hardening. [english.cam.ac.uk]

G.: Pronunciation is where nationality takes petty revenge.

S.: So even “Rossetti” itself became a little test case.

G.: Yes. To say it properly was to grant the family a continued Italianity; to say it badly was to naturalise them by violence.

S.: A very English form of hospitality.

G.: Quite.

S.: Second, the Italian father gave the children an actual line back to Dante Alighieri, to Italian medieval poetry, to political exile, and to romantic nationalism.

G.: Yes, and not merely as reading matter. Gabriele Rossetti wrote commentaries on Dante, speculated on hidden anti-papal codes, and filled the house with Italian literary and political atmosphere. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti inherits not just a name but a programme.

G.: Or at least a set of temptations. That is often closer to family life.

S.: Third, it mattered because the English saw him as both one of them and not one of them.

G.: Exactly. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is accepted into English artistic life, co-founds the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, paints English models, writes in English, but remains marked by Italian origins enough to be continuously described through them. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: Which makes him peculiarly fit to found a movement that wishes to go back before Raphael.

G.: Because going back before Raphael is, for an Englishman of ordinary pedigree, an art-historical preference; for Rossetti, it is also a family route into Italy before academies became too tidy. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: So his Italianity mattered aesthetically as a source of permission.

G.: Very well put. It gave him permission to make Italian medievalism feel less like tourism and more like domestic archaeology.

S.: Yet surely he was not simply “Italian” in London.

G.: No, and here one must be careful. He was not Gabriele Rossetti transplanted. He was London-born, London-educated, English-speaking, institutionally English, and artistically formed in the Victorian metropolis. [browningsc...ndence.com], [victorianweb.org]

S.: So if some Englishmen thought him wholly foreign, they were being lazy.

G.: As Englishmen often are when nationality becomes decorative.

S.: But if others thought him wholly English, they were also being lazy.

G.: Exactly. The Rossetti case punishes the appetite for one label.

S.: Then perhaps the cleanest formula is that Gabriele Rossetti remained an Italian in London, while Dante Gabriel Rossetti became an English artist under constitutive Italian conditions. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: That is excellent.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it, with the usual reductions in flourish.

S.: Happily. Then let us say more about the family branch itself. Do we know more of the line in Vasto?

G.: Public summaries are often thin, but there is enough to say the branch is Vastese and Abruzzese, not Florentine, Venetian, or Roman. Gabriele Rossetti is described as born in Vasto, son of a blacksmith, clever enough to study in Naples. [britannica.com], [wikitree.com]

S.: So not a patrician Roman Rossetti then.

G.: No. Which is a useful correction to any aristocratic fantasy induced by later Victorian frames.

S.: Though one web source rather grandly calls him “Italian nobleman.” [en.wikipedia.org]

G.: Web sources often give nobility the way grocers give parsley.

S.: Sensible. Then the more reliable line is modest but ambitious: Vasto, literary talent, Naples, politics, exile, London. [britannica.com]

G.: Exactly. A very nineteenth-century route, though not one English domestic ideology was eager to advertise.

S.: Because the family in London was full of Italian academics, exiles, and politics, not just tea and childhood. [amershammuseum.org]

G.: Yes. The Amersham Museum piece nicely notes that the house was usually full of Italians debating politics and art and declaiming poetry. That is not quite a normal English nursery. [amershammuseum.org]

S.: More a domestic Risorgimento with drawing-room upholstery.

G.: Precisely.

S.: Then the Londoners thought him Italian enough to be marked, but English enough to exhibit.

G.: Very good. The foreign father made the household romantically interesting; the London birth of the children made them safely usable by English culture.

S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti could become a major English painter-poet while still carrying the aura of Mediterranean difference. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: Yes, and that aura helped. English culture likes foreignness best when it can own it by birth certificate.

S.: Then how Italian did Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself think he was?

G.: Not simply or programmatically Italian in the father’s political sense, but profoundly attached to Italian literary and artistic lineage. He changed the order of his names to foreground Dante, translated early Italian poets, and made Italian medievalism central to his art. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: Which is more than decorative surname loyalty.

G.: Much more. It is elective cultural filiation.

S.: Yet he never went to Vasto, it seems.

G.: The recent Palazzo Florio note says the bond was spiritual rather than physical and that he never visited Vasto. One treats such local commemorative writing with due caution, but the point sounds plausible enough. [palazzoflo...iovasto.it]

S.: So he belonged to Italy imaginatively, genealogically, linguistically, artistically, but not by residence.

G.: Exactly. Which is the most Victorian way of belonging to anything.

S.: And what of William Michael Rossetti?

G.: A useful reminder that the family Italianity was not confined to the painter-poet. William Michael Rossetti was heavily involved in the Pre-Raphaelite movement as editor, secretary, and historian. The family as a whole matters, not just the luminous brother. [italymagazine.com], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: And Christina Rossetti, of course, is no minor appendix.

G.: Certainly not. But Dante is the usual centre because his very name makes the genealogy theatrically useful.

S.: “Dante Gabriel Rossetti” already sounds like the whole argument in five syllables too many.

G.: Exactly. It is an English artistic persona wearing Italian ancestry without apology.

S.: Then let us be dry and explicit. The genealogy for Speranza could be put thus: Gabriele Rossetti, born Vasto, marries Frances Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori, and their London-born children include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite founder. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: Yes. Add that both paternal and maternal lines were Italian or Anglo-Italian exile-literary lines, so the London branch is not the accident of one foreign father but a whole expatriate milieu. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk]

S.: Which helps explain why the household is bilingual and culturally anomalous. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk]

G.: Exactly.

S.: Now, did Gabriele Rossetti think himself English at all?

G.: In the thin civic sense, perhaps increasingly as resident, employee, husband, father, and scholar. But the available summaries stress rather his persistence as Italian patriot, exile, and professor of Italian. He is not presented as an assimilated English man of letters who happened to be born abroad. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: So England gave him platform, not replacement identity.

G.: Nicely put.

S.: And Londoners?

G.: Londoners likely thought him emphatically Italian, though in the respectable form of “Professor of Italian,” which is a much more manageable kind of foreignness than revolutionary refugee with active opinions.

S.: The family, then, occupies that interesting English category: foreign enough to fascinate, useful enough to install.

G.: Yes. We are very good at that category.

S.: Then the phrase “how un-Italian Rossetti thought he was” probably needs division between father and son.

G.: Exactly. The father did not think himself un-Italian. The son could not think himself simply Italian without absurdity, but neither could he think himself merely English without diminution.

S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the child of an Italian father and a London literary-exile house, not the negation of Italianity but its translated continuation. [amershammuseum.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: Very well put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Again, keep it.

S.: Then why did it matter for the Pre-Raphaelite story specifically?

G.: Because the movement’s appeal to pre-Raphaelite art, early Italian painting, medieval devotion, and anti-academic sincerity becomes less a purely English rebellion when one of its founders carries actual domestic Italy into the studio. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: So Rossetti gives the Brotherhood an internal Italian corridor.

G.: Exactly. The corridor is part family, part philology, part fantasy, but it is there.

S.: Only an Italian can be not a post-Raphaelite, but a pre-one.

G.: I wish I had said that first.

S.: You may still appropriate it Englishly.

G.: I prefer licensed looting. But yes, there is something fittingly Rossettian in founding a movement that defines itself by going back before Raphael under the sign of Dante. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: It sounds almost too designed.

G.: Families sometimes overperform their symbolism for later critics.

S.: And Vasto naturally now claims the lot.

G.: As towns should. Local patriotism is the mildest useful vanity.

S.: The Italy Magazine piece on Vasto celebrating the family does exactly that: it traces the line from Gabriele Rossetti of Vasto to the English-born children who stirred Victorian London. [italymagazine.com]

G.: Quite right too. It is one of the few civic uses of art history that does not immediately become intolerable.

S.: Then if Speranza wishes to have one Rossetti dialogue with Grice and another somewhere else, he is justified.

G.: Entirely. Rossetti is common enough as a surname, but the Rossetti of Pre-Raphaelite London is genealogically specific: Gabriele Rossetti of Vasto, his marriage into the Polidori line, and the four London-born children. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

S.: So he should not confuse Domenico Rossetti or other Rossettis with the Vastese-London exile branch.

G.: Correct. Surnames invite sloth; genealogy corrects it.

S.: There is also the point that the English often treated “Italian” as a general atmospheric category, not a specific provincial one.

G.: Exactly. Vasto, Naples, Tuscany, London — the distinctions mattered deeply to Italians and much less to Victorians except when picturesque. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: So Gabriele Rossetti may have felt intensely southern and Neapolitan in ways London flattened into “Italian professor.” [britannica.com]

G.: A very good point. National labels in exile are often produced by the host as much as by the exile.

S.: Then the father’s Italianity is politically and regionally rich; the son’s is culturally elective and artistically generative.

G.: Excellent.

S.: Thank you.

G.: We are nearly done. Let us have the dry final formulation.

S.: Very well. The Rossetti who matters for the Pre-Raphaelite genealogy is Gabriele Rossetti, born in Vasto, Abruzzo, exiled from the Kingdom of Naples, settled in London, and married to Frances Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori. Their London-born son Dante Gabriel Rossetti becomes co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The father remained fundamentally Italian in political and literary allegiance; the son was English by birth and practice, but constitutively Italianate in household, language, literary inheritance, and artistic self-fashioning. London thought the father unmistakably Italian and the son usefully, intriguingly, not quite not so. [en.wikipedia.org], [amershammuseum.org], [britannica.com], [english.cam.ac.uk], [browningsc...ndence.com]

G.: Admirably done.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: In England the father was too Italian to be ordinary, and the son too English to be foreign; which is perhaps exactly why only a Rossetti could help found a Brotherhood dedicated to being before Raphael without ever ceasing to be after tea. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]

 

 

Verbali: Rossetti

 

Grice: Rossetti, lei è capace di trovare un antro di pipistrelle e poi farne un argomento rispettabile. Ne parlavo ieri, di sfuggita, col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che in Abruzzo perfino ciò che si perde finisce archiviato con un titolo, come se fosse un incarico.

Rossetti: A Vasto è così: si perde, si ritrova, e intanto si racconta. Io, tra grotte e tragedie, ho imparato che la conversazione è una speleologia: si entra per curiosità e si esce con un enigma in tasca. E spesso l’enigma ha un nome: il fratello perduto.

Grice: Ecco, proprio ieri con Speranza ci siamo messi a ridere su una cosa: chiamarlo “perduto” è già un modo di tenerlo vicino. Se fosse davvero perduto, non avremmo nemmeno la buona educazione di cercarlo; e invece lo si cerca con una serietà quasi burocratica. Mi viene da pensare che certi fratelli si trovino soltanto perché, in fondo, non si sono mai lasciati perdere — found, but not lost.

Rossetti: La sua battuta, Grice, non va perduta su di me; e Speranza sarebbe d’accordo — e magari non c’è nemmeno bisogno che io la “trovi”. Perché il fratello perduto, da queste parti, è spesso un fratello che continua a fare capolino: lo perdi come si perde un sentiero, non come si perde un mondo. E lei, con quel found, but not lost, ha fatto la cosa più vastese che ci sia: ha trasformato una mancanza in una traccia, e una traccia in un ritorno.

 

Verbali: Rossi

 

G.: I was reading Rossi della Marca in the SCR with the sort of comfort one ought probably to confess only under mild pressure.

S.: A dangerous place for medieval commentary, since the armchairs already look as if they were glossing one another.

G.: Quite. But what detained me was the title’s indecent honesty: Commentarius in libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, Facultas Theologiae Parisiensis, 1319.

S.: Because it tells you at once that commentary was not a hobby but a rung.

G.: Exactly. Rossi comments because the institution has decided that commentary is what one does before one may be licensed to do worse.

S.: Baccalaureatus sententiarum first, magister later.

G.: Yes. The title is not a flourish but a functional label. One comments in order to be licensed to comment.

S.: Which made you think of Oxford, naturally.

G.: It is our chief weakness. One sees a medieval institution and immediately recognises it in modern dress.

S.: Austin and the joint seminar on the Categories and De Interpretatione.

G.: Precisely. We do not call it a Commentarius because Oxford prefers Latin to remain an implicature rather than an inscription.

S.: Yet a weekly line-by-line worrying of Aristotle is what, if not commentarius?

G.: That is the nasty truth of it. We say, to ourselves and to one another, that we do it for fun.

S.: And perhaps you do.

G.: If one counts as fun a species of intellectual play in which mistakes are punished by embarrassment rather than expulsion from an order.

S.: Oxford modernises sanctions by making them social.

G.: Very efficiently. Medieval Paris could expel you from an order. Oxford merely makes you feel that you have dropped a fork in front of civilisation.

S.: Which is often more durable.

G.: Exactly. Rossi’s commenting is an official step toward being a magister; ours is a private rite in a place that pretends it has no rites beyond gowns and meals.

S.: You make Oxford sound ecclesiastical.

G.: It is ecclesiastical by denial, which is the purest form.

S.: And reading Rossi made you think your own seminar is less free than advertised.

G.: Quite. We have not abolished the requirement; we have merely learned to call it a seminar and to pretend it is leisure.

S.: Which is a very English improvement on compulsion.

G.: Better upholstery, same staircase.

S.: Then what particularly struck you in the title?

G.: Its crispness. Commentarius. Facultas. 1319. A whole educational economy in three pieces.

S.: And then you had to leave the easier part, namely the reading.

G.: Yes. That is the sharpest irony. One reads with pleasure and then must go and perform one’s own institution.

S.: To meet the master-master.

G.: Austin, yes. He begins one week; the following week I take up.

S.: A pleasing alternation.

G.: Pleasing in the abstract. In practice it means that if he keeps to the syllabus all is well, and if he departs it means that something has been said that cannot be allowed to stand.

S.: Oxford likes to police thought without admitting that it is policing it.

G.: Admirably put.

S.: I learn from good company.

G.: Use the gift sparingly. The irritant, of course, is the difference between disagreeing with Aristotle and disagreeing with Austin.

S.: The latter being harder, because he is in the room and a good deal more manoeuvrable.

G.: Exactly. If one challenges Austin on his own week, he has that characteristic move: you don’t like that argument, all right, I’ll give you another.

S.: Which is not exactly a defence.

G.: No, it is a substitution, performed with the air of someone tidying a room rather than being opposed.

S.: So one goes away feeling not that one has refuted anything, but that one has caused the furniture to be rearranged.

G.: That is precisely the sensation.

S.: Still, something came of it.

G.: Yes, and here fairness compels me. Ackrill attended, listened, learnt the rhythms of the text and the rhythms of our quarrels about it.

S.: And later produced the Clarendon translations.

G.: Of the Categories and De Interpretatione, yes, crediting the late Professor Austin and Mr H. P. Grice.

S.: Generous enough, or mischievous enough.

G.: Quite. There is a public gain in that. More people may now read Aristotle.

S.: But there is also a private loss.

G.: The one no decent Lit Hum man advertises. Translation is a species of ventriloquism.

S.: It gives Aristotle an English voice.

G.: And the voice is not Aristotle’s.

S.: One may call the result good, or good, and mean both.

G.: Exactly. Good in the civic sense, slightly corrupting in the classicist’s sense.

S.: Because it makes it possible to read without the Greek.

G.: And reading without the Greek is like listening to music through a wall: you get the tune and lose the pleasure.

S.: You are very severe on the modern world.

G.: Only when it earns it.

S.: Then Rossi stayed with you not as a saint of commentary but as a reminder.

G.: Yes, as a reminder that commentary was once openly a requirement for advancement.

S.: Whereas Oxford hides the same requirement under conversational charm.

G.: It prefers to disguise old necessities as modern amusements.

S.: Which is perhaps why the seminar interests you so much.

G.: It is one of the few places where Oxford accidentally tells the truth about itself.

S.: By pretending not to.

G.: Naturally.

S.: Then Rossi’s world and Austin’s are not so far apart.

G.: Structurally, no. One comments in order to advance; the other comments in order to remain intellectually visible, correct, and central.

S.: Different forms of promotion.

G.: Or of survival. One must not sentimentalise Oxford. The seminar is also a way of occupying ground.

S.: Against Aristotle?

G.: Against one’s rivals, chiefly. Aristotle is the pretext that confers dignity.

S.: Whereas in 1319 Lombard is the pretext.

G.: Exactly. Peter Lombard then, Aristotle now; institutions like canonical texts the way cats like warm radiators.

S.: Comfortable and unavoidable.

G.: Yes. And the young scholar learns that to handle the text well is to show oneself fit to handle the institution.

S.: So commentary is both intellectual and social proof.

G.: Precisely.

S.: Then when you say Oxford calls it leisure, you mean that it denies the rung while climbing it.

G.: That is beautifully put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. Oxford punishes that more subtly than Paris ever did.

S.: I shall remain only mildly advanced. But tell me: did Rossi himself matter beyond the institutional point?

G.: Certainly. He is not merely an instance of the Commentarius. He is a sharp mind on will, judgment, temperance, free choice, and the deliciously awkward relation between willing with judgment and willing against judgment.

S.: Very Gricean.

G.: Disturbingly so. Universals, strength of will, practical syllogism, moral culpability, election, deliberation, the possibility of sin, all the proper furniture.

S.: Then perhaps the medieval commentarial form is not merely a container.

G.: Never merely. Forms train minds as much as they house them.

S.: So if Rossi comments on Lombard and Aristotle lies behind the schools, then the content already slips beyond the title.

G.: Exactly. The title says Commentarius; the mind inside it may already be conducting a quite independent quarrel.

S.: Which is perhaps also true of your joint seminar.

G.: Entirely. We say we are explaining Aristotle. What we are often doing is sneaking in our own distinctions under cover of fidelity.

S.: That sounds almost dishonest.

G.: It is the oldest honesty in academic life.

S.: Then commentary is always a little parasitic.

G.: And a little creative. That is why it survives.

S.: Medieval Paris at least admitted the requirement.

G.: Yes. That is what I found almost refreshing. Rossi comments because the institution says: comment, and through commentary become licensable.

S.: Oxford says: do come and worry Aristotle with us; it is rather fun.

G.: Precisely. The same ladder, better manners.

S.: Which is more dangerous.

G.: Usually. One notices coercion earlier when it wears a cowl.

S.: While Oxford puts it into tweed and serves sherry.

G.: That is the whole trick of the place.

S.: Then perhaps the real difference is not between commentary and seminar, but between explicit and implicit institutional force.

G.: Excellent. Paris says: this is a rung. Oxford says: this is a conversation. In both cases you had better do it well.

S.: And if not?

G.: In Paris, perhaps no licence. In Oxford, a certain expression in Hall and a slower invitation list.

S.: I begin to think medieval severity had the merit of clarity.

G.: Many severities do.

S.: Yet you do like the seminar, despite all this.

G.: I do, though with the caution due to attractive traps.

S.: Because something real comes of it.

G.: Yes. One learns the text, one learns the quarrels, one learns the habits of discrimination, and sometimes one even learns when a distinction is merely furniture pretending to be architecture.

S.: That sounds like an Austin lesson.

G.: It often was.

S.: Even when he gave you another argument instead of defending the first.

G.: Especially then. Austin’s substitutions were infuriating, but they also taught one that attachment to a particular argument may be a form of vanity.

S.: Or of loyalty.

G.: Vanity in academic dress.

S.: Harsh.

G.: Necessary.

S.: Then Ackrill’s later translations become the public harvest of a private rite.

G.: Exactly. Which is why I cannot wholly sneer. Something civic came from the exercise, even if the exercise itself often felt like being slowly corrected by weather.

S.: That is very Oxford.

G.: It ought to be. Oxford’s weather is largely pedagogical.

S.: Then Rossi gives you a mirror.

G.: Yes, but a mirror with less irony. The medieval title says openly what ours implies. That is why it does philosophical work at once.

S.: Because the institution is visible in the title itself.

G.: Precisely. Commentarius in libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, Facultas Theologiae Parisiensis, 1319. The whole educational ladder engraved in the heading.

S.: While your seminar would never dare call itself Commentarius in Aristotelis Categorias et De Interpretatione, St John’s and elsewhere.

G.: Never. Oxford would rather die than give itself away in so much Latin all at once.

S.: It likes Latin as perfume, not as signage.

G.: Splendidly put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep that, but do not make me sound appreciative.

S.: Never beyond the impersonal register. Then perhaps the old requirement has not vanished, only changed costume.

G.: That is the whole point. We have not abolished the requirement; we have only learned to call it a seminar and pretend it is leisure.

S.: So your walk to Austin is, in effect, a walk to your own weekly commentarius.

G.: Exactly. And as I go, I wonder what precisely we have been sneaking in under the guise of explaining what Aristotle said.

S.: Probably ourselves.

G.: That is the most dangerous answer.

S.: Also the truest.

G.: Which is why one should never write it on the noticeboard.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Parisian, with an Oxford aftertaste.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: Rossi commented because the university required it; we comment because Oxford is too polite to confess that it requires the same thing.

 

 

Grice: Rossi della Marca, mi dicono che lei sa far stare insieme la volontà e la temperanza senza farle litigare in pubblico. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo accennavo al collega filosofo Speranza: lui sostiene che nelle Marche la ragione conversazionale ha sempre un freno a mano tirato—ma con molta eleganza.

Rossi: A Appignano del Tronto l’eleganza è necessaria: se la volontà corre troppo, finisce in predica; se la temperanza frena troppo, finisce in silenzio. Io preferisco tenerle in dialogo: volonta (con l’accento dove lei vuole) come slancio, temperanza come misura, e la conversazione come luogo dove si vede se lo slancio regge la misura.

Grice: E proprio dopo aver conversato con Speranza mi è venuta un’implicatura che non ho bisogno di dichiarare. Non riesco a trovare una parola italiana davvero pulita per entailment (e G. E. Moore lo direbbe così, con aria innocente): tra volonta e temperanza sembra esserci non solo un’alleanza morale, ma un legame più “logico”, per cui quando l’una è ben formata, l’altra non è un optional. Come se una volontà che meriti il nome si portasse dietro, quasi automaticamente, una certa sobrietà—e se manca, è perché non era proprio volontà, ma capriccio travestito.

Rossi: Implicatura “volitiva e temperata” la sua, Grice—e mi piace molto; anche Speranza ne sarebbe contento, benché direbbe che ci vuole un temperato per riconoscerla. E aggiungerebbe (lo so già) che perfino la grafia deve essere temperante: lui diffida di certi “gn” come se fossero forestieri infiltrati nella fonologia italiana. Ma al netto delle sue dogane ortografiche, il punto resta: lei ha colto un legame che non si proclama, si lascia passare. Volonta e temperanza non si promettono: si implicano, e solo chi ha misura sente la forza senza scambiarla per rumore.

 

Verbali: Rossi

 

Grice. St John’s. Back from the Admiralty, and “re‑philosophising” myself at Merton—where the place keeps one conscientiously abreast of all the new things one already knows one does not need to know. We share more with the Italians than either nation cares to confess. We stopped being enemies on the very same day. (Why are wars declared, by the way, but never un‑declared?) Anyway: Merton has its novelties, and Austin—bright chap, that—would put it thus: one doesn’t unknow anything, because one doesn’t unperform either. (A phrase of his that sounds like a joke until you discover it isn’t.) One of the “new things” (which I certainly do not need to know, and therefore immediately know) is that Rossi has been laurea‑lised, as the Italians say. The Gazette reports that the ceremony took place in Florence. Garin, as relatore, commemorated Apollo and Daphne and—one imagines—installed the traditional wreath upon Rossi’s head. “What for?” Strawson asks. He is there, of course, as my straight man. “Rossi is free,” I say. “No more tutorials, no more classes. He has a laurea. He has a tesi. He is, by Italian statute, an expert.” “On what?” says Strawson. “Strawson,” I reply, “your chronic inability to catch my implicatures continues to try my Christian charity. I told you: the man is free. His tesi is on La libertà.” “Very Italian,” says Strawson, dryly. “As per Spinoza, as per Epictetus, as per—who? Surely you don’t just write a thesis on Liberty and get leaves on your forehead.” “Quite right,” I say. “No thesis is allowed to be simply on what the candidate happens to think—because the implicature (the delicious, bureaucratic implicature) is that he is not yet a philosopher. He is learning to be one; he has been taught to be one. It is safer, you see, to anchor your alleged freedom in a respectable fetter.” “And whose fetter is Rossi’s?” says Strawson. “Martinetti’s,” I say. “The great Piero Martinetti. Officially he has liberated Rossi from the fetters of Florence—and, indeed, from Garin himself.” “From Garin?” Strawson says. “But Garin is the relatore.” “Exactly,” I say. “Nobody thinks a thesis without the shadow of the relatore; and usually the shadow of the shadow of the co‑relatore, who will mind every p and every q on your behalf. Martinetti, at least, has the decency to be a fetter you can quote.” Strawson, spoiling it all—as he does—closes with: “But who freed Martinetti? That’s the question.” “By the same token,” I add, “who killed Cock Robin?” —and so on, and so forth, and we are off.

 

Grice: Rossi, lei mi tira sempre verso la storia come se fosse un dovere civile. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: a Vadum Boum lo “storicismo” suona già un po’ continentale, mentre a Bononia pare una forma di educazione sentimentale.

Rossi: A Torino, invece, è quasi igiene mentale. E poi lo storicismo non è un vezzo: è il modo in cui ci ricordiamo che le idee non crescono in serra. Se vuole, lo chiami pure con un’etichetta tedesca: 𝔖𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔲𝔰. Qui non ci spaventa.

Grice: Appunto; e precisamente dopo quella conversazione con Speranza mi è scappata un’implicatura che non ho nemmeno dovuto dire. Quando voi parlate di 𝔖𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔲𝔰 come se fosse l’aria che si respira, state lasciando intendere—senza dichiararlo—che a Vadum Boum noi siamo storicamente “poveri” e dunque teoricamente “ricchi”: da noi, a parte quella gita acquatica di Giulio Cesare nel 55 e 54 a.C… anzi, aspetti: 55 e 54 a.C. corrispondono a 699 e 700 ab Urbe condita. E allora uno si attacca a Romolo per avere almeno un inizio decente: 753, 1 a.U.c., così la storia smette di essere un rumore di fondo e diventa un calendario. E capisco perché a Bononia lo storicismo sembri più naturale: lì Roma è sotto i piedi; qui, al massimo, è nel sillabo.

Rossi: Implicatura storicista la sua, Grice, come Speranza la metterebbe. E mi piace proprio perché non fa la predica: fa vedere l’asimmetria. Da un lato l’università che nasce letteralmente sul sedimento romano; dall’altro il vostro ford che deve inventarsi una romanità di biblioteca. Eppure è lo stesso impulso: se non hai rovine, fai genealogie; se non hai genealogie, fai date; se non hai date, ti inventi un Romolo. In fondo, lo storicismo è anche questo: un modo elegante di ammettere che pure la “poca storia” è già una storia—solo più ironica.

 

G.: Rossi, ieri con Speranza dicevamo che a Firenze perfino una tesi sulla libertà sembra laurearsi due volte: una per il titolo, e una per la corona d’alloro.

Rossi: È il destino delle buone tesi, caro Grice: sembrano promettere l’assoluto e poi devono imparare la prudenza di un relatore, di una città, e d’una tradizione.

G.: Appunto; e la mia implicatura è che la libertà, quando passa per una laurea, somiglia sempre un poco a una libertà sorvegliata: abbastanza libera da essere scritta, non così libera da non avere già un padrino.

Rossi: Prendo liberamente la sua implicatura libera, sapendo che io e lei siamo entrambi liberi di cancellarla.

 

 

Verbali: Rossi

 

S: What are you reading?

G: Just in from Blackwell’s. I’ve not started it yet—I’m only reading the introduction.

S. (dryly): I hate it when the introduction uses up every ounce of attention one was prepared to give the book.

Grice: This is different. Strawson: How so? Grice: It’s Italian. Their introductions are—how shall I put it?—twice the normal length by constitutional law. Strawson: So—what’s it called?

G: Don’t rush me. It’s Einaudi, and the author’s name is right there on the cover—look. (Grice turns the book so Strawson can see it.) Strawson: Yes, yes. But did you read the small print on the second page? Grice: No. Strawson: Do. Grice (reads): Kritik der historischen Vernunft. Strawson: You knew it all along. You weren’t reading Rossi; you were reading Dilthey—Kant reborn, as the Italians would say, in translation. Grice: Kant reborn—and twice as long, because he’s been born Italian.   Grice: How many critiques of how many reasons are we going to have? Pure reason, practical reason, historical reason—soon we’ll need a critique of the critique. Strawson: At least yours would be short. Grice: Not at all. My “Critique of Conversational Reason” has been a long time coming. You tucked it into that notorious footnote in your Introduction to Logical Theory. Grice: A footnote is where a man puts what he most wants read, while pretending not to insist. 

 

G.: Rossi, quante ragioni dobbiamo ancora criticare, prima che la ragione stessa chieda tutela sindacale?

Rossi: Caro Grice, la ragione pura, la pratica e la storica non sono tre capricci editoriali, ma tre modi in cui la ragione scopre di non bastare mai a sé stessa.

G.: Allora la mia implicatura è che, se continuiamo così, avremo presto una critica della critica della ragione critica, e magari con un’introduzione più lunga del libro.

Rossi: La sua implicatura, Grice, è critica, ragionevole e storica — e così pure la sua cancellazione.

 

 

Verbali: Rossi

 

Clifton, 1926.

Grice cheers up Simpson (dialogue draft) Grice (Clifton, 1926). Simpson looks a bit sunk today—so I do what one does: I try to jolly him up. “What’s eating you, Simpson?” He gives me the tragic look. “The beak. He’s right, Grice.” “The beak is always right. It’s in the rules. What’s the charge—declensions, or that other hobby of his?” “My Latin isn’t the Pope’s, and he knows it.” “Your Latin isn’t anyone’s, Simpson. That’s why we’re here.” Simpson pulls something from his bag as if it were contraband. “Look what I’m reading.” I take it. “This doesn’t look like Cicero.” “It isn’t. That’s the point. It’s fascinating. And if I’m snivelling, it’s laughter. Three little dialogues—Latin—by one Tommaso Rossi.” “Never heard of him.” “You have now. Campanian chap. Born near Benevento.” “Benevento,” I say, warming to it, “which in Latin means—” “Something heroic,” Simpson says. “—something like good luck. Or at least a good event. Not ‘good wind,’ before you try it on the beak.” Simpson brightens. “Shame. Good wind would’ve suited the place.” “And what are the dialogues about?” He leans in, delighted. “Some divine mysteries. Rossi calls them alcuni misterj divini.” I whistle. “Then put it down and pick up some Cicero.” “Why?” he says—now positively lively. “It’s Latin. It’s helping. Dialogue form’s a boon, too: you ask, I answer, I ask, you don’t—keeps the thing moving. And the beak can hardly complain about conjugations when half the book is inquit.” “Simpson,” I say, “you’re not reading the Latin we do here. You’re reading neo‑Latin—the sort the Pope’s secretary might pretend to understand.” He grins. “How can you tell?” “By the alcuni,” I say, suddenly solemn. “Cicero never met an alcuni in his life.” Next day, I feel I was a bit abrupt. So I go and knock—pointlessly—since I’m already halfway in. “Simpson?” He looks up. “Grice.” “I’ve brought your Rossi. And I’m prepared to render the title into something the beak can’t sneer at.” He sits up. “Go on then.” “Considerazioni…” “Considerationes,” Simpson supplies at once—good lad, when he’s not being martyred. “Di alcuni misterj divini…” “De quibusdam mysteriis divinis,” he says, very pleased with himself. “Quite. And raccolte in tre dialoghi?” He hesitates. “Collectae…? In tribus dialogis?” “Respectable,” I say. “If the beak objects, tell him we’re practising the ablative by force.” At that moment—naturally—there’s a rap at the door. The beak appears, as if summoned by irregular agreement. “What’s this, Grice?” “Latin,” I say. “Voluntary Latin. The best sort.” He peers at Simpson, then at me. “That was a good lesson, Grice. I’m proud of you.” Then, turning to Simpson, unexpectedly soft: “And you too. It’s almost… a little divine mystery, what Grice has managed to do.” He pauses. “On you, I mean, Simpson. On you.”

 

Grice: Rossi, lei ha un modo tutto campano di far venire Lucrezio fuori dal latino come se fosse appena sceso dal Vesuvio. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: secondo lui, a Clifton Lucrezio mi sarebbe sembrato irrimediabilmente “matto”, solo perché parlava troppo serenamente di atomi e di paura.

Rossi: A San Giorgio, invece, lo trattiamo come uno che ha soltanto sbagliato compagnia: lo metti vicino a un po’ di psicologia filosofica e torna subito presentabile. Del resto, tra Benevento e Napoli si impara che certe frasi non sono folli: sono soltanto fuori contesto.

Grice: E precisamente dopo aver interagito con Speranza mi è scappata un’implicatura che non ho neppure dovuto formulare. A Clifton, da ragazzo, Lucrezio mi suonava come una febbre lucida: troppo ordine, troppa calma, troppa materia. Poi arrivo a Vadum Boum e — senza che Lucrezio cambi una sillaba — diventa “sano”: non perché si sia addolcito lui, ma perché lì ho finalmente imparato a sentire la sua voce come una voce romana, non come un capriccio. Insomma: la pazzia era nella mia prima educazione, non nel poema.

Rossi: Implicatura diannostica la sua, Grice, come Speranza la metterebbe; anzi, Speranza la vorrebbe scritta così apposta, perché “diagnostica” gli pare parola troppo dotta e un po’ straniera alla fonologia italiana — e poi lui proibisce pure “gn”, dice che non è italiano ma un inciampo grafico. Comunque l’idea è perfetta: a Clifton Lucrezio sembra un esame medico fatto in corridoio; a Vadum Boum, con un po’ di aria e di metodo, lo stesso “caso” risulta normale. E io, come Speranza, adoro quando la cura è solo un cambio di orecchio.

 

Verbali: Rota

 

G.: Bostock has brought me a volume with the reverence other people reserve for liturgy.

S.: Rota, I take it.

G.: Naturally. Fondamenti di teoria combinatoria, which Bostock presents as if it were simply logic with a better tailor.

S.: And you have told him, I hope, that counting is not the first-order predicate calculus with identity merely because it also uses symbols.

G.: I had hoped you would tell me that, since you delight in saving philosophers from mathematics one notation at a time.

S.: Gladly. First-order predicate calculus with identity is one thing; combinatorics is another. They may shake hands, but they do not marry.

G.: Begin at the altar, then.

S.: Very well. In first-order predicate calculus with identity one writes formulas like ∀x(Fx → Gx), ∃xFx, and x = y.

G.: Which already sounds Anglican.

S.: It is merely extensional. One quantifies over individuals in a domain D, interprets predicate letters by subsets or relations on D, and treats identity as the distinguished two-place relation satisfying reflexivity and the indiscernibility clauses.

G.: In English, then: one says there is something, everything, and the occasional thing is the same thing.

S.: Exactly. Semantics is given by a structure M = ⟨D, I⟩, where I assigns denotations to constants, predicate letters, and function symbols. Truth is defined recursively.

G.: Bostock would call that home.

S.: Quite. And proof theory then proceeds by axioms or natural deduction. One proves things like ∀xFx ⊢ ∃xFx, or derives ∀x(x = x), or uses Leibniz-style substitution principles.

G.: One also writes enough brackets to keep the undergraduates from roaming.

S.: That too. But combinatorics is not primarily about satisfaction in structures for a predicate language. It is about finite or discrete structures themselves and the invariants or counts attached to them.

G.: Fancy counting with a conscience, then.

S.: Better than that. Consider a finite set X with |X| = n. The combinatorial question is often: how many objects of a given sort can be built from X?

G.: Such as?

S.: Subsets, partitions, permutations, trees, matroids, chains in a poset, lattice paths, set systems, incidence structures, and all the rest.

G.: Whereas predicate calculus asks whether a formula is true in a structure, not how many trees have gone missing from it.

S.: Precisely. In logic one asks whether M ⊨ φ. In combinatorics one asks for quantities like the number of subsets of X, namely 2^n, or the number of permutations, namely n!, or the number of k-element subsets, namely .

G.: The symbols already look more muscular.

S.: They are. Rota’s genius lies in seeing that these counts sit inside algebraic structures. He does not merely count; he organises the ways of counting.

G.: Which is why the title says fondamenti.

S.: Yes, but not in the Hilbertian sense. Not foundations as formal metatheory of mathematics, but foundations as unifying concepts inside a mathematical domain.

G.: So Bostock hears “foundations” and thinks Gödel, completeness, consistency, decidability.

S.: Exactly. While Rota means something closer to: here is the invariant machinery beneath these discrete constructions.

G.: A little unfair on both of them, but not unamusing.

S.: Now let me be concrete. Take a finite partially ordered set P. One may define its zeta function in the incidence algebra by ζ(x,y) = 1 if x ≤ y, and 0 otherwise.

G.: Incidence algebra already sounds more civilised than extensional semantics.

S.: It is different civilised behaviour. The incidence algebra I(P) consists of functions f on intervals [x,y] with convolution .

G.: Which is what I call a sentence only if written on a blackboard.

S.: Quite. Now the Möbius function μ is the convolution inverse of ζ, so μ * ζ = ζ * μ = δ, where δ(x,y) = 1 if x = y and 0 otherwise.

G.: There is your identity again, but now it behaves itself.

S.: Yes, but not as logical identity. Here δ is the identity element of an algebra under convolution.

G.: So already the same sign is wearing overalls rather than a gown.

S.: Precisely. And Möbius inversion says that if g(x) = , then .

G.: This is what you call not first-order predicate calculus with identity.

S.: Exactly. There is no formula φ of FOPC whose central business is to invert cumulative sums over a poset by means of an incidence algebra.

G.: You disappoint the literal-minded.

S.: They deserve it. Rota’s world is discrete structure and algebraic inversion, not truth conditions for quantified formulas.

G.: Yet Bostock still feels at home enough to show it off.

S.: Because the style of rigour is congenial. Exactness, proof, combinable rules, invariant forms, no woolliness, and above all no metaphysical upholstery.

G.: Which is why mathematicians pass for blue-collar literae humaniores in Oxford.

S.: A splendid phrase.

G.: Keep it if you like.

S.: Gladly. But the contrast sharpens if we compare typical questions. In first-order logic one asks whether . In combinatorics one asks how many labelled graphs on n vertices there are, namely .

G.: The one is valid or invalid. The other proliferates.

S.: Exactly. Or take partitions of an n-element set. Their number is the Bell number B_n. One studies generating functions like .

G.: That already sounds like a foreign policy I do not trust.

S.: It is perfectly innocent. Or not innocent, but mathematically innocent.

G.: Which is already more than can be said for some philosophies of logic.

S.: Quite. Another difference. In first-order logic the combinatorial content often enters only incidentally, for example in counting models up to isomorphism of finite cardinality, or in finite model theory later on. But in Rota the counting is central and structural.

G.: So the theorem is not “this formula has a model,” but “these configurations are counted by this polynomial.”

S.: Very often yes. For example, the characteristic polynomial of a lattice or matroid captures enumerative and geometric information at once.

G.: Matroids. There is a word that sounds like a bad college.

S.: It is a good concept. A matroid M on a finite set E abstracts dependence. One may define it by independent sets, rank function, closure operator, circuits, or bases.

G.: That at least sounds almost logical.

S.: There are bridges, yes. But again, not first-order predicate calculus with identity. A matroid is a combinatorial structure satisfying exchange axioms, such as: if A and B are independent and |A| < |B|, then there exists b in B \ A such that A ∪ {b} is independent.

G.: This is a civilisation in which dependence has better manners than in ordinary life.

S.: Exactly. And Rota excelled in seeing relations between these structures, incidence algebras, Möbius functions, generating functions, and geometric arrangements.

G.: Which makes his “foundations” more like the plumbing beneath several rooms than the legal title to the house.

S.: Very good. Whereas Bostock’s foundations are closer to the legal title, the survey map, and the questions whether the property is even consistent.

G.: Then where does identity enter on the logical side in your proper Bostockian manner?

S.: In first-order logic with identity one adds axioms or rules ensuring reflexivity, , and substitution: from infer , or in relational form substitute co-designative terms salva veritate in extensional contexts.

G.: Salva veritate always sounds like a headmaster’s wife.

S.: She is a useful woman. But combinatorics does not revolve around such substitutional discipline. It revolves around structures whose elements may be labelled or unlabelled, counted or quotiented by symmetry.

G.: Ah, symmetry. The mathematician’s excuse for everything.

S.: A very good excuse. Pólya counting, for instance, uses group actions to count colourings modulo symmetry. If a finite group G acts on a finite set X, one counts orbits by Burnside’s lemma:

G.: I can already hear Bostock pretending that this is just logic with harder furniture.

S.: He would be wrong, though with dignity. Burnside’s lemma is not a theorem of first-order predicate calculus with identity. It belongs to the combinatorial analysis of group actions.

G.: And Rota loves precisely such machinery.

S.: Yes. Also generating functions. Ordinary generating functions, exponential generating functions, formal power series, recurrence relations, all used not to interpret formulas but to organise enumeration.

G.: It runs in the blood, I suppose. He comes from the land of Peano.

S.: Harvard educated, though.

G.: It runs in the blood, though.

S.: Very likely. Italy gave him Peano’s atmosphere, or at least its afterglow: notation, exactness, symbolic courage, and the thought that mathematics may also be written elegantly.

G.: Peano, unlike many philosophers, understood that a symbol can improve a room.

S.: Yes. Yet Rota’s higher degree being American helps explain why some Italians deny him full philosophical citizenship while some Americans grant it as a curiosity.

G.: Which is perfectly national on both sides.

S.: Quite. But his philosophical side is real enough. He wrote on phenomenology, on Husserl, on mathematical intuition, on the primacy of identity, and on all the uneasy points where mathematicians become reflective.

G.: Thereby irritating both departments.

S.: Exactly. The mathematicians suspect literature, the philosophers suspect theorems.

G.: The right combination for a tolerable man.

S.: Very likely. Now, let me sharpen the formal contrast once more. In first-order logic we have syntax: if P is an n-ary predicate and t1,…,tn are terms, then P(t1,…,tn) is a formula; if φ and ψ are formulas, so are ¬φ, (φ ∧ ψ), (φ ∨ ψ), (φ → ψ), ∀xφ, ∃xφ.

G.: A proper grammar of obedience.

S.: And semantics: M,s ⊨ ∀xφ iff for every d in D, M,s[x↦d] ⊨ φ. M,s ⊨ ∃xφ iff for some d in D, M,s[x↦d] ⊨ φ. M,s ⊨ t1 = t2 iff the denotations of t1 and t2 under s coincide.

G.: Whereas in Rota one instead defines structures and counts them, or studies functions on them.

S.: Precisely. For example, the exponential formula says that if a class of labelled structures is built from connected components, then the exponential generating function of all structures is the exponential of that of the connected ones.

G.: That is a much more social theorem.

S.: It is. Or think of Stirling numbers of the second kind S(n,k), counting partitions of an n-element set into k nonempty blocks. They satisfy

G.: A recurrence relation. Which is what philosophers call a habit.

S.: Exactly. But again, nothing about ∀x(Fx → Gx). The problems are structurally different.

G.: Yet the English undergraduate, seeing symbols, thinks “logic.”

S.: Especially if logic is the only serious symbolism he has met. To him, combinatorics may look like logic after exercise.

G.: Which is why Bostock carries the book as if it were confession.

S.: Yes. He senses rigour and mistakes the species.

G.: A familiar philosophical error.

S.: Indeed. Another contrast: logic is often indifferent to finitude unless explicitly restricted. A first-order theory may have infinite models; compactness and Löwenheim-Skolem almost insist on it. Combinatorics typically delights in finite objects.

G.: The finite is friendlier to blackboards.

S.: And to actual counting. Rota’s world is discrete, often finite, often algebraically organised. His infinites are formal or generating, not model-theoretic by default.

G.: Which is already enough to keep him out of the stricter Sub-Faculty sense of “logic.”

S.: Yes. Bostock’s bread and butter would be proof, entailment, quantification, identity, perhaps set theory and metalogic. Rota’s is posets, lattices, incidence algebras, combinatorial identities, finite geometries, and the like.

G.: Yet one should not deny the adjacency.

S.: Certainly not. Boolean algebras, lattices, order theory, closure operators, dependence relations, all sit near algebraic logic. A logician with taste can admire them.

G.: That is Bostock’s better side.

S.: Quite. He shows it to you because he thinks you will appreciate the ideal of exact structure, even if not the exact subfield.

G.: And I do, up to a point. It is why I can make jokes about foundations without wishing the blackboard dead.

S.: Rota would approve. He liked blackboards better than many philosophers like prose.

G.: Aune once realised that I could care less about blackboards, which drove him from the playgroup more quickly than any maxim.

S.: A pity. Rota would have kept him there with chalk.

G.: Perhaps. Now tell me how a combinatorial argument differs, in feel, from a logical proof.

S.: A good combinatorial proof often counts the same set in two ways, constructs a bijection, or exploits an algebraic generating device. A logical proof derives formulas from rules preserving truth in all interpretations.

G.: So one may prove by exhibiting a complement map, whereas one proves by derivation.

S.: Exactly. The first is combinatorial bijective insight. The second is proof-theoretic discipline.

G.: And Bostock, poor man, hopes they are really cousins.

S.: They are cousins, but not identical twins.

G.: That will disappoint him less if I say it kindly.

S.: Say instead that Rota provides a mathematics of structured possibility, not a logic of formal consequence.

G.: Very nice.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it. Now, blue-collar passing for literae humaniores. Do you think that unfair to mathematics?

S.: Not unfair, only classically English. Greats men always speak as if mathematics were manual labour improved by notation.

G.: Which is why it secretly attracts them. A proof is a respectable form of work.

S.: Exactly. And combinatorics is almost artisan by temperament. One arranges, counts, classifies, inverts, constructs.

G.: A cabinet-maker’s Platonism.

S.: Splendid.

G.: Keep that too.

S.: Happily. But Rota’s phenomenological side complicates the picture. He is not simply a cabinet-maker.

G.: No. He likes to peer into the workshop and ask what sort of vision of identity made the cabinet possible.

S.: Hence his essays on Husserl and the primacy of identity.

G.: Which, ironically, returns him closer to philosophy than Bostock’s safer admiration can manage.

S.: Because once you ask what identity is doing in mathematics, you are no longer merely counting.

G.: And once you write Whitehead or Rota for a laurea, one suspects the laurel never quite comes off.

S.: There is your wreath again.

G.: It belongs here. Once one writes on Whitehead for a laurea, Whitehead sits round the skull. Once on Rota, perhaps the chalk does.

S.: Better chalk than laurel, perhaps.

G.: Easier to wash out. Now, Peano again. How much does that ancestry matter?

S.: Intellectually, a good deal. Italy had a strong symbolic and foundational mathematical tradition: Peano, his notation, his axiomatic style, the civilised confidence that mathematics may write itself clearly.

G.: Whereas Oxford in philosophy inherited symbols as a controlled embarrassment.

S.: Very much so. Hence the charm of Rota to an English logic-minded undergraduate: he sees symbols not apologising for themselves.

G.: Which Bostock finds bracing.

S.: Yes. But if he says it is logic, one must still correct him.

G.: Kindly.

S.: Kindly, but firmly. Fondamenti di teoria combinatoria is not first-order predicate calculus with identity. It is a foundational exploration of discrete mathematical structure.

G.: Put more simply?

S.: Predicate calculus asks what follows from what in a formal language over a domain. Combinatorics asks how many structures there are, how they are arranged, and what invariants govern them.

G.: Better. And where the two touch?

S.: In shared rigour, in adjacent algebraic structures, in the common dislike of vagueness, and occasionally in dependence and order. But the central questions differ.

G.: Then Bostock arrives with the book under his arm like a relic that has refused a miracle on demand.

S.: And you, being you, ask whether it fundamentally combines the fundamentals.

G.: To which Providence, for once, remains silent.

S.: Or answers by generating function.

G.: That would be a distinctly Harvard deity.

S.: Harvard educated, as I said snugly.

G.: It runs in the blood, though.

S.: Peano would agree, in better notation.

G.: Then the final moral?

S.: That Rota is mathematical enough to impress a logician, philosophical enough to unsettle one, and combinatorial enough to remind Oxford that not every serious symbol belongs to predicate calculus with identity.

G.: Dry enough?

S.: Sufficiently Vigevanese, with Harvard chalk on the cuffs.

 

 

Grice: Rota, mi è capitato di parlarne ieri, di sfuggita, col collega filosofo Speranza: sosteneva che lei non è davvero “italiano” finché non ha litigato almeno una volta con una lavagna. Io gli ho risposto che, nel mio caso, la lavagna mi ha sempre litigato addosso per prima.

Rota: Ah, Speranza… ha il fiuto delle cose essenziali. E poi io vengo da Vigevano: lì la ragione conversazionale passa per il gesso e per la combinatoria. Senza lavagna, Whitehead diventa arredamento e Husserl resta in tasca come un biglietto del tram.

Grice: Giustamente; e proprio dopo quella conversazione con Speranza mi sono sorpreso a fissare la parola “lavagna” come se fosse un argomento. Non lo dico, ma si capisce: quando uno insiste sulla lavagna, sta lasciando intendere che il pensiero vuole una superficie pubblica, non solo una coscienza privata. E mi sono anche chiesto da dove venga il termine: pare che “lavagna” sia legata alla pietra “lavagna”, cioè l’ardesia, dal latino medievale “lapis” e dalla famiglia di “lavare”, perché quella superficie si cancella, si pulisce, si rifà. Insomma: un supporto nato per essere riscritto, come le nostre premesse.

Rota: La sua implicatura è lavagnesca, come la metterebbe Speranza: cancellabile, riscrivibile, eppure testarda come l’ardesia. E infatti la lavagna è la morale del gruppo di gioco: non è un monumento, è una partita. Ci scrivi, sbagli, cancelli, e il gesso ti ricorda che anche l’identità è fatta di tracce e di correzioni. In fondo, la filosofia sulla lavagna è discreta: appare a colpi di segno, e sparisce quando ha fatto il suo dovere.

 

Verbali: Rotondi

 

G.: Rotondi’s contributo in the Corriere librario is exactly what one expects Rome to produce after a war: a little civic resurrection by way of paper.

S.: And you think Rome does this unlike Oxford.

G.: Entirely unlike Oxford, and unlike Bologna too, though for different reasons.

S.: Yet Rome was the cradle of Latin dialectica.

G.: Yes, which is part of the nuisance. A city may be philosophically foundational without being educationally comfortable.

S.: So Rome gives origin without giving ease.

G.: Precisely. Rome invented a public severity of reason that Oxford later domesticated and Bologna earlier institutionalised.

S.: Then what is wrong with Rome?

G.: Nothing, except that it is too much itself. Rome is always performing Rome.

S.: Whereas Oxford performs not performing.

G.: Exactly. Oxford’s greatest theatrical gift is to call theatre “the ordinary.”

S.: And Bologna?

G.: Bologna is an old machine that knows it is a machine. That already makes it more honest than either.

S.: So Rome is theatre, Oxford is disguised theatre, and Bologna is apparatus.

G.: Admirably compressed.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become Roman about it.

S.: I shall remain only municipally pleased. But tell me why Corriere librario set you thinking about cities at all.

G.: Because corriere sounds like movement, urgency, running with news. And then one remembers that books in Rome do not run; they circulate by being talked into existence.

S.: Which sounds rather Roman.

G.: It is anciently Roman. The old city spread texts by chains of hands, patrons, slaves, readers, scribes, and talk, not by the modern fantasy of neutral distribution.

S.: So the contributo is already civic before it is bibliographic.

G.: Entirely. Contributo, not article. Contribution, as if the city were being rebuilt by notes and notices.

S.: You like that.

G.: I do. It is one of the few respectable postwar sentiments.

S.: Yet you still say Rome does not compare with Oxford.

G.: Not as a university city in our sense. Rome is too large, too layered, too central, too imperial, too ecclesiastical, too administrative, and too self-conscious ever to behave like a town of dons.

S.: But Oxford is a city.

G.: Barely, and by a technicality.

S.: Christ Church.

G.: Exactly. Because Christ Church is a cathedral, Oxford acquires the legal dignity of a city, which is a splendid example of ecclesiastical geometry turning a ford into an urban concept.

S.: So Oxford is a city because a church insists on it.

G.: More or less. The cathedral confers municipal metaphysics.

S.: And your monks joke?

G.: Ah yes. Oxford is a city in which the monks are the students.

S.: Meaning?

G.: Meaning that the true cloistering population is not the chapter but the undergraduates, while the fellows are merely senior students with better carpets.

S.: Not masters?

G.: Only administratively. In spiritual economy they remain advanced pupils.

S.: That is unfair to some fellows.

G.: A pity, but not a decisive one.

S.: Then Rome differs because its students do not resemble monks.

G.: Rome’s students resemble citizens, clerks, provincials, pilgrims, ideologues, and survivors, but never properly monks unless they are literally monks.

S.: So the city enters the philosophy by the social posture it invites.

G.: Precisely. A city teaches before any faculty does.

S.: Then what did Rome teach dialectic?

G.: Gravity, publicness, legal form, sentence, forensic edge, and the habit of treating reason as something uttered before others under conditions of consequence.

S.: Not Athenian dialectic, then.

G.: Not in the first instance. Athens gives the drama of questioning, the gymnasium, the porch, the school. Rome gives the forum, the case, the maxim, the sententia, the public weight of saying.

S.: Which is why you say Latin dialectica is Roman, not Athenian.

G.: Exactly. Greek supplied the terms; Rome supplied the civic musculature.

S.: And Oxford?

G.: Oxford supplies the staircase, the tutorial ambush, the donnish aside, and the habit of pretending that public reason is private correction prolonged.

S.: That is very Oxford.

G.: It ought to be. One earns these sentences by climbing too many stairs.

S.: So if Rome teaches sentence and forum, Oxford teaches question and interruption.

G.: And also postponement. Oxford loves truth best when one can defer it to next week’s essay.

S.: Bologna again?

G.: Bologna teaches syllabus, chair, faculty, common examination, visible structure, the city as already university-shaped.

S.: While Oxford hides the structure in persons.

G.: Exactly. Oxford turns institutions into names and names into corridors.

S.: Rome turns names into monuments.

G.: Yes, and that is the trouble. Monumentality can overteach.

S.: Yet Rotondi, with his little contributo, seems not monumental at all.

G.: Which is why he is interesting. He is doing Roman circulation at the modest scale: trade circular, whisper network, bookshop survival, civic reconstruction through bibliographical appetite.

S.: So the city acts through small media.

G.: Very much so. Rome is never only marble; it is also paper, gossip, recommendation, and the old hand-to-hand method of making a text a public object.

S.: That sounds rather like ancient dialectic too.

G.: Exactly my point. Dialectic in Rome was never merely school logic. It was reason in circulation.

S.: Through courts, senate, household, library, patronage.

G.: Yes. Through every institution where speech acquired consequence.

S.: Then perhaps city means the arrangement of consequential speech.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Happily. Now tell me why London enters as the place for redbricks.

G.: Because England, absurdly, has long allowed London to be both capital and anti-university city. The true civic universities, the redbricks, grew elsewhere under smoke and self-improvement.

S.: Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool.

G.: Exactly. London is too much metropolis to feel like a philosophical city of formation. It is a place of institutions rather than an institution-shaped place.

S.: As Rome is.

G.: In that respect, yes. Both capitals overdetermine the mind. They produce philosophy, certainly, but less by collegiate intimacy than by traffic, administration, and collision.

S.: Whereas Oxford and Bologna are more total in their educational shape.

G.: Quite. In Oxford one cannot cross the street without hitting a curriculum. In Bologna one cannot discuss a degree without encountering a ministry.

S.: And in Rome?

G.: In Rome one cannot buy a book without history stepping on the transaction.

S.: Which Rotondi’s Corriere librario proves.

G.: Exactly. Even the title corriere is already civic etymology pretending to be commerce.

S.: You said before that a bookseller’s courier does not run but circulates.

G.: Yes, and that is where Rome becomes philosophically apt. It does not compare with Oxford because Oxford institutionalises thinking. Rome historicalises it as one lives.

S.: So Rome is less a university town than a city in which philosophy cannot avoid becoming urban memory.

G.: Excellent. That is the right distinction.

S.: Then why do you still resist saying Rome is superior?

G.: Because origin is not supervision. Rome gave Latin dialectic its civic stamp, but Oxford and Bologna each did something Rome did not: they made prolonged educational habitats out of thinking.

S.: Rome remained too broad.

G.: Too broad, too symbolic, too interrupted by empire, church, state, ruin, and rebirth.

S.: Whereas Bologna could simply teach.

G.: Bologna could teach with old institutional confidence. It had the chair, the faculty, the gloss, the degree, the visible order.

S.: And Oxford could tutorialise.

G.: Which is a mixed blessing, but an effective one. It turns philosophy into a weekly domestic nuisance.

S.: Not unlike monastic correction.

G.: Hence my monks. The Oxford pupil lives under regulated reading, periodic examination, small-room exposure, and the quasi-liturgical cycle of essays.

S.: So the undergraduates are novices.

G.: In a sense, yes. And the fellows are monks who lost their vows but kept the timetable.

S.: Christ Church then becomes not merely cathedral but enabling fiction.

G.: Precisely. It lets Oxford call itself a city while remaining fundamentally a federation of cloisters and staircases.

S.: Rome, by contrast, has too many real streets.

G.: Yes, and too many centuries walking down them.

S.: Then is a city bad for philosophy?

G.: Not at all. But different cities encourage different modes. Athens favours public disputation and school formation. Rome favours forensic gravitas and civic sententiousness. Bologna favours institutional continuity. Oxford favours miniature adversarial pedagogy. London favours publication and dispersion.

S.: And the redbricks?

G.: They favour seriousness without medieval costume, which is no small contribution.

S.: You sound almost affectionate toward them.

G.: Only almost. They had to build what Oxford merely inherited and disavowed.

S.: Then where does Rotondi belong among these cities?

G.: In Rome, but at the anti-monumental level. The second-hand shop, the circular, the contributo, the bookseller’s network, the civic whisper system.

S.: So he gives you Rome below the triumphal register.

G.: Exactly. Rome in paper sleeves rather than marble.

S.: And that is perhaps truer to dialectic than the monuments are.

G.: Often yes. Dialectic needs circulation more than commemoration.

S.: Yet Rome remains the source.

G.: Of Latin dialectica as public practice, certainly. Cicero is unthinkable without the city that trained the sentence to carry civic consequence.

S.: Not Athenian, then, because Athens gives the form but Rome gives the civic weight.

G.: Very good. Plato invents the dramatic conversation; Rome invents the magistrate’s sentence as philosophical material.

S.: And Oxford makes the sentence into a question.

G.: Or into an essay title, which is sometimes worse.

S.: Bologna makes it into a syllabus line.

G.: Exactly.

S.: London turns it into a review.

G.: Very often. And a badly paid one.

S.: Then perhaps the city influences philosophy chiefly by deciding what kind of speech is socially serious.

G.: That is excellent.

S.: Better than “arrangement of consequential speech”?

G.: Its companion, perhaps. One should keep both.

S.: I shall.

G.: Without becoming metropolitan about it.

S.: Never beyond Bloomsbury. Now, what does Rome teach that Oxford cannot?

G.: That speech is public before it is pedagogic. Oxford teaches one to answer. Rome teaches one to utter under history.

S.: And what does Oxford teach that Rome cannot?

G.: That thought may survive by being local, dry, and weekly.

S.: Bologna?

G.: That institutions need not hide in personalities to be intellectually formative.

S.: And London?

G.: That publication is a form of civic weather rather than education.

S.: That is quite severe.

G.: It is only London.

S.: Then if a student of philosophy moves from one city to another, he changes not only library but genre.

G.: Precisely. In Athens he converses, in Rome he pronounces, in Bologna he studies, in Oxford he is corrected, in London he submits.

S.: Very dry.

G.: Geography deserves it.

S.: Then Rotondi’s contributo matters because it is Roman dialectic in miniature: a civic note that makes books move by implication, recommendation, and urban memory.

G.: Splendidly put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: You are improving.

S.: Oxfordly?

G.: Unfortunately.

S.: Then the final verdict on Rome?

G.: Rome does not compare with Oxford or Bologna because it is not, in the relevant sense, a university city at all; it is the city in which Latin dialectic learned to sound public, grave, and historically burdened before universities turned such habits into methods.

S.: And Oxford is still a city.

G.: Yes, by cathedral courtesy and undergraduate monasticism.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: Rome made dialectic public, Bologna made it curricular, Oxford made it claustral, and London, being London, made it reviewable.

 

 

Grice: Rotondi, lei con Roma antica ci vive come altri vivono con l’orologio: sempre addosso. Me lo diceva ieri, di sfuggita, il mio collega filosofo Speranza: “Con Rotondi anche il silenzio sembra avere una dedica in latino.”

Rotondi: Caro Grice, a Vicovaro il latino non è un vezzo: è un modo di tenere a bada il presente. E poi, dopo una libreria “eterodossa” sotto il fascismo e una fuga tra i monti, uno impara che le parole possono salvarti la pelle oppure fartela perdere. L’arte del silenzio, appunto: e l’uso della parola.

Grice: Già. E, dopo aver chiacchierato con Speranza, mi accorgo che qui c’è un’implicatura che mi scappa fuori da sola: quando lei parla di Roma antica, io sento come se Roma mi corresse nelle vene. Non perché io voglia fare il romano d’importazione, ma perché—e questo lo capisce chi ha avuto una formazione classica da adolescente, quando “o ce l’hai o non ce l’hai”—a Clifton mi hanno messo il latino in tasca prima ancora della tessera dell’autobus, e poi a Vadum Boum con la Lit. Hum. mi sono ritrovato a respirare declinazioni come aria. Così, quando lei dice “massime” e “aforismi” di Roma antica, io non sento solo un archivio: sento un’abitudine del sangue.

Rotondi: La sua implicatura, come direbbe Speranza, nasce da uno di quei sette colli—anche se lui, poveretto, non saprebbe dirci quale. E il punto è proprio questo: certe cose si imparano quando si è ragazzi, non quando si è già professori. Lei non sta dicendo “sono romano”; sta lasciando intendere che la classicità, presa in età giusta, diventa una seconda circolazione. E allora capisce perché a Roma antica la ragione è conversazionale: non è dottrina, è abitudine—come il passo in salita, come il fiato che viene su senza che ci pensi. .

 

Verbali: Rovatti

 

G.: Principia Mathematica is by Whitehead and Russell, but because one of them later became a lord, posterity behaves as if arithmetic had always favoured the peerage.

S.: Oxford has long held that if a title can obscure a collaboration it ought to be allowed a little exercise.

G.: The nuisance is that Whitehead is the primary author in labour if not in heraldry, yet the public memory hears “Russell’s Principia” with the same ease with which it hears “the British Empire” and forgets the shipping.

S.: To be fair, Whitehead had the bad taste to remain neither a lord nor a scandal.

G.: Nor even properly a philosopher in the other place, by which I mean Cambridge; there he taught mathematics and only later came to philosophy after the gown had already made up its mind about him.

S.: So the title itself was a Cantabrian costume.

G.: Entirely. Principia is one of those Cambridge words which mean “we are Newtonian enough to borrow grandeur and modest enough not to blush.”

S.: As Moore had already shown with Principia Ethica.

G.: Exactly. What more principles do they want, one wonders; first mathematics, then ethics, and if they had had the courage perhaps Principia Tea-Cups.

S.: Principia Small-Talk would have improved the place.

G.: Cambridge never liked small talk unless it could be printed in Latin.

S.: Yet later Oxford books make it sound as if Whitehead is simply the man.

G.: Yes, that is the curious reverse. Urmson in Philosophical Analysis and Warnock in 100 Years of Philosophy in England write as if Whitehead occupies a central philosophical throne, when in truth he is both indispensable and oddly displaced.

S.: Displaced because his importance is real but of the wrong institutional kind.

G.: Precisely. He matters immensely, but not in the way Oxford later liked to tell the story of itself.

S.: Not as an ordinary-language don with a staircase full of tutees.

G.: Certainly not. Whitehead comes to philosophy from mathematics, which is always socially suspicious in England because it suggests one may know something before one has learnt how to speak about it apologetically.

S.: So Oxford inherits Whitehead partly as a foreign body.

G.: A homegrown foreign body, yes; a Cambridge mathematician later naturalised into philosophical history because the story needed one grand precursor more respectable than Bosanquet and less embarrassing than McTaggart.

S.: That is already rather good.

G.: Keep it and make it drier.

S.: Gladly. But why does Whitehead stay so magnetised for people like Rovatti?

G.: Because once an Italian writes Whitehead as a laurea title, with no subtitle at all, it ceases to be merely a philosopher and becomes a laurel wreath with a surname attached.

S.: Whitehead as a wreath?

G.: Exactly. The thesis is not only about Whitehead; it is a way of being laureated through Whitehead.

S.: And once the wreath is on, it is difficult to take Whitehead off it.

G.: That is the Milanese comedy. In Oxford I took a B.A. in Lit. Hum. and never had to write anything for the degree in that continental, laureating sense. One wrote essays constantly, of course, but not a definitive object called a thesis which follows one about like a civic title.

S.: So the difference is between being assessed by repeated papers and being crowned by a single labour.

G.: Precisely. Oxford punishes you in installments; Milan adorns you in public and expects fidelity to the adornment.

S.: Which makes Rovatti’s Whitehead rather more destiny-like than your own relation to any single figure at Greats.

G.: Entirely. I could have been said to belong to Aristotle on Monday, to Kant on Wednesday, and to a rather irritated Butler by Friday, without anyone forcing a wreath over my head.

S.: Whereas one writes Whitehead under Paci and Geymonat, and Whitehead remains in the photograph.

G.: Yes. The photographic element must not be underestimated in Italy. A laurea is half metaphysics and half civic portraiture.

S.: You make it sound like a municipal sacrament.

G.: Most education does once robes appear.

S.: Yet you do not deny that Whitehead’s philosophical work, especially later, gave others plenty to write on.

G.: Of course not. Process, organism, event, relations, eternal objects, God turning up in academic prose as if smuggled in under mathematical cover; there is enough material to overfeed a faculty.

S.: But your complaint is historical rather than doctrinal.

G.: Exactly. The historical story is misarranged. Whitehead is made to look like the continuous philosophical man when he is in truth a mathematician who moved into philosophy with astonishing breadth and rather little concern for the neat departmental border.

S.: Which departments then tidy up retrospectively.

G.: They always do. Universities are machines for turning adventure into curriculum.

S.: Then Principia Mathematica itself suffers two distortions: first that Russell eclipses Whitehead by rank and anecdote, and second that Whitehead gets retrospectively recast as if he had always been a philosopher.

G.: Beautifully put.

S.: I try to keep up.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: Never beyond the college allowance. But tell me about Cambridge again. You call it the other place because Oxford requires some geography of contempt.

G.: A geography of familiarity, rather. Whitehead taught mathematics there, not philosophy, and that matters because Cambridge later liked to reabsorb him into philosophy without admitting that his route in was not the standard one.

S.: While Oxford later tells the whole twentieth-century story as if the line ran from Moore and Russell to analysis, with Whitehead sitting somewhere like an over-furnished waiting room.

G.: Yes. Warnock in particular is perfectly capable of making Whitehead seem like a station through which the train of English philosophy necessarily passed, when in fact many boarded elsewhere and hardly looked out.

S.: And Urmson?

G.: Urmson has the historian’s vice of elegance. He can write the narrative so smoothly that the contingent begins to look canonical.

S.: That sounds like a charge you would prefer as praise in your own case.

G.: Only if deserved, which is a different matter.

S.: Then was Whitehead ever really one of “the men” for Oxford?

G.: Not in the tribal sense. He was admired, cited, taught, occasionally revered, and more often summarised. But he was not one of the house gods in the way later memoirs can imply.

S.: Because he was too metaphysical?

G.: That too. Whitehead in full cry makes even the braver Oxonians reach for aspirin. He is one of those philosophers one respects by abbreviation.

S.: So the very people who make him central also make him manageable.

G.: Precisely. “Whitehead” becomes a chapter heading, not a living risk.

S.: And Rovatti at twenty-four writes Whitehead with no subtitle, which sounds rather more like surrender.

G.: Or bravado. Young men choose titles like that to show they have lungs.

S.: You said as much of Italian lauree before.

G.: Yes, and I stand by it. A thesis entitled Whitehead announces not merely interest but respiration.

S.: Then how does the wreath work in your joke?

G.: Very simply. Laurea already carries the laurel in its body. Once you write on Whitehead for a laurea, Whitehead becomes wound round your head by the institution itself.

S.: That is very nearly etymological satire.

G.: Etymology exists largely for satire in the right hands.

S.: Then your own Greats degree spared you this.

G.: Entirely. Lit. Hum. did many things to me, not all kind, but it never fastened a single philosopher to my forehead.

S.: Instead it gave you a roaming license.

G.: Precisely. One endured collections, schools, and an endless economy of essays, but one did not emerge as “the Whitehead man” or “the Bradley man” by ceremonial necessity.

S.: So Oxford, for all its tyranny, preserved a certain anti-monographic freedom at first degree level.

G.: Yes. A freedom purchased, of course, by other inconveniences, including ignorance in public and terror in private.

S.: But that may be preferable to being publicly laureated as a Whiteheadian.

G.: For an Englishman, certainly. We prefer our intellectual commitments to remain deniable.

S.: Whereas the continental system likes declaration.

G.: And supervisors. Never forget Paci and Geymonat. To have both a relatore and a correlatore is already to confess that one thesis may need two parents.

S.: Or two witnesses.

G.: Or two maxims, as I once said. The Maxim of Relation and the Maxim of Co-Relation.

S.: You were proud of that.

G.: Moderately. It is the sort of joke one earns by staying too long in libraries.

S.: Then let us return to Whitehead himself. Why does the word Principia strike you as a costume?

G.: Because it is at once grand and evasive. It says first things while dodging the vulgarity of saying what first things are. Cambridge adored that sort of dignity.

S.: And Moore’s Principia Ethica borrows the same air.

G.: Entirely. One half expects Principia Umbrellarum, a foundational account of umbrellas in pure good faith.

S.: But in Whitehead’s case the title also masks authorship.

G.: Yes, because a grand title invites readers to think in monuments, not in division of labour. Once the monument stands, the lord is remembered, the schoolmaster is not.

S.: Whitehead was not a schoolmaster.

G.: In the best English sense he was: a master of exactness without sufficient scandal to remain famous properly.

S.: Whereas Russell had both scandal and a title eventually.

G.: Exactly. Posterity adores moral misbehaviour supported by aristocratic punctuation.

S.: Then the complaint is not merely that Russell gets more credit, but that the conditions of remembrance are socially ridiculous.

G.: Deeply ridiculous. Philosophical memory is always less rational than philosophers advertise.

S.: And yet you admit Whitehead’s later metaphysics has a grandeur none of the tidy analysts can match.

G.: Certainly. But grandeur is not the same as influence, and influence is not the same as narrative centrality.

S.: So Whitehead is indispensable but not representative.

G.: There you have it. He is one of the great anomalies through which English philosophy passes without being able to say whether he belongs to the route or to the weather.

S.: Splendidly put.

G.: Keep that too.

S.: You are distributing property recklessly.

G.: I am thinking of wills and Russell, which always makes me careless. Now, Rovatti and Whitehead. Why do Italians at that moment find him attractive?

S.: Because process looks like philosophy with lungs, as you said.

G.: Yes, and because filosofia teoretica in Milan could still welcome a thinker who crossed science and metaphysics without apologising every third sentence.

S.: Oxford required more apology.

G.: Much more. One had to make metaphysics sound like housekeeping or not do it at all.

S.: While Whitehead sounds like a cosmic engineer.

G.: Exactly. Italians admire such men because they still believe systems may be inhabited rather than merely footnoted.

S.: And Paci supervising Whitehead makes a certain sense.

G.: It does. Phenomenology, process, scientificity, grand categories, all under the civic solemnity of a laurea title. One can almost hear the room.

S.: Whereas at Oxford no one at first degree level is required to write Whitehead and then carry the memory in formal dress.

G.: No. One carries instead the memory of question sheets, dons, tutors, and the peculiar fact that one may leave with a degree and no monograph attached to one’s name.

S.: Which you think counts for something.

G.: A good deal. It leaves a man with fewer ceremonial debts.

S.: Fewer wreaths, more scars.

G.: Exactly. And scars are easier to deny socially.

S.: Then perhaps the difference is this: the laurea gives you a title through a philosopher, while Lit. Hum. gives you habits through an ordeal.

G.: Very good indeed.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become laureated by compliment.

S.: Never beyond the bachelor level.

G.: Better. Now, tell me: why do later English histories keep Whitehead in view if he is not “the man”?

S.: Because he is too large to omit and too awkward to place.

G.: Exactly. Historians hate large awkward men. They therefore make them central in prose and marginal in spirit.

S.: So Whitehead becomes a respectable stop on the way to what they really care about.

G.: Moore, Russell, analysis, language, Austin, Ryle, Strawson, and the rest. Whitehead is placed in the vestibule with a sufficient umbrella stand.

S.: Whereas Rovatti begins in the vestibule and may never quite leave it.

G.: Because once Whitehead is your title, Whitehead is also your institutional ancestry.

S.: And the laurel binds.

G.: Yes. That is why I say one can take Whitehead off the shelf more easily than off a laurea.

S.: One could make a thesis of that.

G.: In Milan they probably did.

S.: Then let me see if I have your four complaints properly ordered. Principia Mathematica is remembered under Russellian prestige more than Whiteheadian labour; Whitehead taught mathematics at Cambridge, not philosophy, so his later philosophical centrality is retrospective; the title Principia is a Cambridge habit of grandeur shared by Moore’s Principia Ethica; and later Oxford histories magnify Whitehead into a representative figure he never quite was.

G.: Exactly.

S.: And the Rovatti point?

G.: That Oxford’s first degree left me unwreathed by any single philosophical allegiance, whereas a laurea entitled Whitehead crowns a young man with the very name he may later spend his life trying to wear lightly.

S.: So the real joke is educational.

G.: All good English jokes about philosophy are educational in the end.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: In Oxford one could leave with Lit. Hum. and no wreath at all; in Milan one could leave with Whitehead on one’s head, and the difficulty ever after was not to think it a hat.

 

 

Grice: Rovatti, lei non può capire: ieri, parlando di sfuggita col mio collega filosofico Speranza, mi sono sentito dire che io e Austin saremmo “ossessionati” dal gioco. Io ho risposto: benissimo, ma allora lei è il terzo della triade, e per di più emiliano: quindi con più disciplina nel divertimento.

Rovatti: Disciplina nel divertimento: mi piace. A Modena, se dici “gioco”, ti chiedono subito “quale?” e “con quali regole?”, e poi ti offrono un caffè come se fosse una clausola del regolamento. Ma sì: i giochi e gli uomini, e soprattutto le mosse.

Grice: E infatti, come dicevo dopo aver chiacchierato con Speranza, mi lascia perplesso una cosa: perché i filosofi, che hanno fame di generalità, parlano del “gioco conversazionale” come se fosse uno solo? Io non lo dico apertamente, ma si capisce: chi dice “il” gioco sta suggerendo che esista un unico regolamento, una sola partita, una sola tavola. E invece sono giochi, giocchi, partite diverse: interrogatorio, confidenza, disputa, flirt, lezione, pettegolezzo. Cambiano la posta, cambiano le mosse, cambiano persino i falli.

Rovatti: Implicatura giocosa, Grice, come la metterebbe Speranza; o, se vuole, un’implicatura “da gioco”, come direbbe lui. E qui l’inglese aiuta: game è la cornice generale, la struttura con regole; play è l’atto del giocare, l’andare in scena, la libertà concreta del gesto. In italiano possiamo provare a rendere la distinzione così: gioco (sistema) / giocare (pratica); oppure gioco (genere) / partita (occorrenza); oppure gioco (regole) / recita o gioco scenico (esecuzione); e perfino, se vogliamo essere più tecnici, gioco (istituzione) / ludere (ludicità in atto). Così capiamo perché “il gioco conversazionale” al singolare è comodo: è una generalità che fa risparmiare fatica—ma ogni volta che parliamo, in realtà, stiamo già giocando una partita diversa.

 

Verbali: Rovere

 

G.: Rovere wanted Provence to do what Rome and Paris had both already failed to do politely.

S.: Which was?

G.: To provide a Latin Union with a language elegant enough to flatter Italy, France, and whatever remained of civilisation after diplomacy.

S.: And you propose to honour him by putting Virgil through four tongues.

G.: Exactly. Latin first, because one ought to begin where sense begins behaving seriously.

S.: Then Italian.

G.: Yes, and not merely Italian, but an older Italian, or at least a consciously antique one, to let Latin and Italian look one another in the face without modern cosmetics.

S.: Then English.

G.: Inevitably. Otherwise we could not misunderstand ourselves properly.

S.: And then Provençal.

G.: In tribute to Rovere’s impossible good taste.

S.: You also want to show the affinity among Latin, Italian, and Provençal, as against English.

G.: More precisely, the affinity of I, II, and IV. English is the necessary witness, not the favoured cousin.

S.: Why not III, as per Rovere’s Union?

G.: Because English is never Latin enough to be admitted without first pretending it has no designs on the house.

S.: Fair. Then the first question is the passage.

G.: We cannot go wrong with the opening of the Aeneid.

S.: Arma virumque.

G.: Exactly. The first seven lines are enough to establish grammar, destiny, empire, and the whole inconvenience of Juno.

S.: You may then mark the verses with slashes, as requested.

G.: Quite. It makes translation look like architecture instead of laundry.

S.: Then give me the Latin first.

G.: Gladly. Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit / litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto / vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram; / multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem, / inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum, / Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae. [thelatinlibrary.com], [dcc.dickinson.edu]

S.: The thing behaves as if it had always known it would be translated.

G.: Most imperial openings do.

S.: Now the Italian.

G.: Here one must be careful. The earliest Italian vernacularisation is not always available in a convenient public form line for line, and the medieval or early modern Italian tradition is various. So for our purpose I would give a deliberately archaicising Italian rendering rather than pretend to cite one definitive first translator where the evidence is messy. The point is affinity, not fraud. [academia.edu]

S.: A sound principle, and almost moral.

G.: Do not overpraise it. Here then: L’arme e l’omo io canto, che primier da’ liti / di Troia, per destino profugo, venne in Italia / e a’ liti lavinii; molto per terre e per mare / fu quegli sbattuto per forza de’ superi, / per l’ira tenace della crudele Giunone; / molto sofferse altresì in guerra, fin che fondasse / la città e recasse in Lazio i suoi numi: onde il legnaggio latino, / e i padri albani, e l’alte mura di Roma. Grounded in the Italian vernacular translation tradition of the Aeneid. [academia.edu]

S.: It has enough archaism to creak politely.

G.: That is all one wants from piety in language.

S.: And English?

G.: Here I may safely use a public-domain translation. Mackail is sober and does not make Virgil sound like a man auditioning for a brass band. So: Arms and the man I sing, who first from the coasts of Troy, / exiled by fate, came to Italy and the Lavinian shores; / much buffeted on sea and land by violence from above, / through cruel Juno’s unforgiving wrath, / and much enduring in war also, till he should build a city / and bring his gods to Latium; whence came the Latin race, / the lords of Alba, and the lofty walls of Rome. [gutenberg.org], [theoi.com]

S.: It is competent in the English way: obedient and faintly apologetic.

G.: Better apologetic than theatrical.

S.: And now the Provençal.

G.: Here we encounter the difficulty that a stable public-domain Provençal or Occitan translation of the opening is not straightforwardly retrievable from the evidence in hand. So I shall do what your brief actually wants and provide a tribute in literary Provençal mode, not pretending to be Mistral’s lost secretary. That is an original rendering in homage, not a historical citation.

S.: Which is fair enough, provided you say so.

G.: I have now said so. Here then, in a Provençal-inflected literary rendering: Lis armas e l’ome cante, que primié deis rivas / de Troia, fòraçat pel fat, venguèt en Italia / e vèrs lis ribas de Lavini; fòrça foguèt batut / sus tèrra e sus mar per la fòrça dei sobirans, / per l’ira tenèla de la sauma Junon; / fòrça patiguèt encara en guèrra, fins qu’auborèsse / una ciutat e portèsse sos dieus en Latium: d’aquí / venguèron lo linhatge latin, lis aujòus albans, / e lis auti barris de Roma. Adapted tribute in literary Provençal/Occitan style, based on the Latin opening. [thelatinlibrary.com]

S.: You have smuggled Latium through rather than Provençalising it.

G.: One must not localise empire too cheaply.

S.: Now that we have the four, what exactly is the affinity you want to show?

G.: Several things at once. First, the lexical kinship of arma, arme, armas. Second, virum becoming uomo or ome. Third, the syntactic willingness of Latin, Italian, and Provençal to let the line move by apposition and suspended clause without English immediately demanding iron rails.

S.: English does like iron rails.

G.: It distrusts long periodic hospitality. Latin and its daughters are happy to welcome a participle, a destination, and an imperial future into one sentence before serving the verb its full dignity.

S.: So Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit litora behaves more naturally in Italian and Provençal than in English.

G.: Precisely. English must either submit awkwardly or translate by managerial rearrangement.

S.: Mackail does the latter with decent restraint.

G.: Yes. He keeps enough of the order to show he has met the poem, but not enough to frighten schoolmasters.

S.: Then the affinity of I, II, and IV is not merely lexical but rhythmic and civic.

G.: Very much so. These three languages share a tolerance for ceremonial unfolding. English can imitate it, but it does not live there by inheritance.

S.: Rovere would have liked that.

G.: He would have overliked it, which is why he remains charming.

S.: Let us inspect the first word in all four.

G.: Latin arma. Italian l’arme. English arms. Provençal lis armas.

S.: The plural is robust throughout.

G.: Yes, because epic begins more comfortably with warfare than with introspection.

S.: And virum?

G.: Virum in Latin, l’omo in archaic Italian, the man in English, l’ome in Provençal.

S.: There the kinship of II and IV is especially visible.

G.: Exactly. Homo to uomo and ome is a much shorter family walk than homo to man, which arrives by another inheritance and must behave itself in company.

S.: Then fato profugus.

G.: There again. Latin and its daughters can keep fate and exile in close apposition without embarrassment. English says exiled by fate, which is decent, but more explanatory and less compact.

S.: So destiny itself is more grammatical in Latin, Italian, and Provençal.

G.: A dangerous but not wholly false remark.

S.: And Laviniaque litora?

G.: The adjectival relation is another point. Italian and Provençal can keep Lavinian or Lavini quite close to the noun. English is obliged to choose between Latinity and intelligibility.

S.: It chose Lavinian.

G.: Quite rightly, though the English ear hears it as scholarly rather than native.

S.: Which perhaps it is.

G.: Everything in Virgil is scholarly once it crosses the Channel.

S.: Then multum ille et terris iactatus et alto.

G.: Ah, there the daughters are at home. Molto per terre e per mare, fòrça foguèt batut sus tèrra e sus mar. English says much buffeted on sea and land, which is competent, but one hears translation where one hears inheritance in the Romance forms.

S.: So the whole exercise vindicates Rovere’s Latin Union.

G.: Only linguistically, not politically. That is an important distinction. Languages may resemble one another more closely than their ministries do.

S.: Dry, but fair.

G.: One tries.

S.: And Juno?

G.: Juno behaves well in all four, which proves that divine resentment is remarkably portable.

S.: Saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.

G.: Yes. The memory and wrath clause is especially revealing. Latin can pack memory into an epithet and make wrath the motive. Italian and Provençal can imitate that architecture with less strain than English, which must unpack to remain respectable.

S.: Through cruel Juno’s unforgiving wrath.

G.: Very decent, but plainly explanatory.

S.: Whereas per l’ira tenace della crudele Giunone and per l’ira tenèla de la sauma Junon preserve the old compactness better.

G.: Exactly. The daughters understand the mother’s way of carrying temper in grammar.

S.: Then perhaps Rovere’s real dream was not absurd.

G.: Politically absurd, philologically less so. A diplomatic language drawn from Provençal would at least flatter the Mediterranean sense that speech should carry history visibly.

S.: And that is what English resists.

G.: English prefers usefulness, then pretends usefulness is candour.

S.: You are being unfair to English.

G.: I am being English about English.

S.: The highest form of patriotism, perhaps.

G.: Or the least embarrassing. Now, consider dum conderet urbem, inferretque deos Latio.

S.: Again, the daughters move comfortably with the subjunctive or purpose-like unfolding.

G.: Exactly. Fin che fondasse la città e recasse in Lazio i suoi numi. Fins qu’auborèsse una ciutat e portèsse sos dieus en Latium. English must make that into till he should build a city and bring his gods to Latium, which is fine, but the modal courtesy is more external.

S.: While the Romance forms feel like domestic continuations.

G.: Just so.

S.: Then genus unde Latinum, Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.

G.: That final ascent is perhaps the strongest case. Latin, Italian, and Provençal all allow the catalogue of political descent to rise toward Rome with ceremonial ease. English does it, but sounds like a commemorative plaque.

S.: The lords of Alba, and the lofty walls of Rome.

G.: Exactly. Good, but stone-faced.

S.: Whereas e i padri albani, e l’alte mura di Roma and lis aujòus albans, e lis auti barris de Roma keep a more familial and civic warmth.

G.: Warmth, yes, though one must not make Virgil cosy.

S.: Heaven forbid.

G.: Indeed. Empire should never sound upholstered.

S.: Then if you had to state the thesis in one sentence?

G.: Latin, archaic Italian, and Provençal share enough lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical temper that Virgil’s opening passes among them as family business, whereas English receives it honourably but as an adopted heir.

S.: That is rather good.

G.: Keep it, then.

S.: Happily. But should we not say something about the Italian translation tradition proper?

G.: Yes. The medieval and early modern Italian engagement with the Aeneid is rich but complicated, with vernacularisations, abridgements, and reworkings rather than one single first monumental equivalent that would do all our work for us here. So our archaic Italian is deliberately representative in spirit rather than falsely documentary in every syllable. [academia.edu]

S.: A prudent confession.

G.: Scholarship survives by them.

S.: And the Provençal?

G.: Entirely a tribute rendering, since the point is to honour Rovere’s fancy of a Latin public language through an idiom plausible enough to show kinship without counterfeiting a particular historical version.

S.: So no false Mistral.

G.: No false Mistral. That would be indecent.

S.: Then let us look once more at the first sequence as a block.

G.: Very well. Latin: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit / litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto / vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram; / multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem, / inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum, / Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae. [thelatinlibrary.com], [dcc.dickinson.edu]

S.: Then the Italian.

G.: Archaicising Italian: L’arme e l’omo io canto, che primier da’ liti / di Troia, per destino profugo, venne in Italia / e a’ liti lavinii; molto per terre e per mare / fu quegli sbattuto per forza de’ superi, / per l’ira tenace della crudele Giunone; / molto sofferse altresì in guerra, fin che fondasse / la città e recasse in Lazio i suoi numi: onde il legnaggio latino, / e i padri albani, e l’alte mura di Roma. Grounded in the Italian vernacular translation tradition. [academia.edu]

S.: English.

G.: Arms and the man I sing, who first from the coasts of Troy, / exiled by fate, came to Italy and the Lavinian shores; / much buffeted on sea and land by violence from above, / through cruel Juno’s unforgiving wrath, / and much enduring in war also, till he should build a city / and bring his gods to Latium; whence came the Latin race, / the lords of Alba, and the lofty walls of Rome. [gutenberg.org], [theoi.com]

S.: And the Provençal tribute.

G.: Lis armas e l’ome cante, que primié deis rivas / de Troia, fòraçat pel fat, venguèt en Italia / e vèrs lis ribas de Lavini; fòrça foguèt batut / sus tèrra e sus mar per la fòrça dei sobirans, / per l’ira tenèla de la sauma Junon; / fòrça patiguèt encara en guèrra, fins qu’auborèsse / una ciutat e portèsse sos dieus en Latium: d’aquí / venguèron lo linhatge latin, lis aujòus albans, / e lis auti barris de Roma. Tribute rendering in literary Provençal/Occitan style, adapted from the Latin opening. [thelatinlibrary.com]

S.: It does rather make Rovere sound less absurd.

G.: That is the danger of beautiful languages. They can rehabilitate poor politics.

S.: And the lesson?

G.: That philology is often wiser than federation.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Provençal.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: If Rovere wanted Provence to unite the Latins, Virgil has already done the job more quietly: the languages still recognise their mother, even when the diplomats fail to recognise one another.

 

G.: Rovere, sospetto che il provenzale sia una lingua internazionale soprattutto quando nessuno insiste troppo perché lo diventi.

ROVERE: Caro Grice, è proprio lì che comincia la sua eleganza politica, poiché una lingua persuade meglio quando non sembra ancora una politica.

G.: Allora la mia implicatura è che il provenzale trionfa non parlando troppo di sé, il che è già quasi una cancellazione ben educata.

ROVERE: La sua implicatura è quasi provenzale, Grice, perché consiste precisamente nella sua cancellazione.

 

 

 

Verbali: Rovere

 

G.: Powell has returned, I take it, with that small exile of a book under his arm.

S.: Quietly, as moral requirements do.

G.: Exactly. He has asked me to set one of Rovere’s Inni sacri to music, which is the sort of request that arrives dressed as culture and leaves dressed as labour.

S.: You sound touched.

G.: Only in the sense in which one is touched by a tax.

S.: Then you have opened the volume.

G.: I have. And the first nuisance is perfectly simple: what was the first inno sacro?

S.: A reasonable question, though perhaps not one singers ask before they begin emoting.

G.: Singers rarely ask reasonable questions before emoting. That is what keeps them singers.

S.: And what does the evidence say?

G.: The surviving order usually begins with A Santa Geltrude. That is the first hymn listed in the collection as transmitted. [it.wikisource.org], [books.google.com]

S.: So Powell has brought you not theology but sequence.

G.: Sequence is already a species of theology in such books. One saint before another is never wholly innocent.

S.: Then the first hymn is to Saint Gertrude.

G.: Yes, as far as the collection’s order goes. One should add that the bibliographical tradition around these hymns is slightly untidy, which only improves it. The title page evidence points to the Paris edition of 1832, and later printings follow. [books.google.com], [archive.org], [fr.wikipedia.org]

S.: Untidy books are often more alive than tidy ones.

G.: That is because tidy books have usually been dead longer.

S.: Then what is the opening line of the first hymn?

G.: That is the next difficulty. The index clearly gives A Santa Geltrude as first, but the full page readily available in the material I found shows, in extenso, Alla Chiesa Primitiva. Inno primo, not the beginning of Geltrude. So I can tell you the first hymn in order, but the fullest verified opening line presently visible to me from the text on hand is the opening of Alla Chiesa Primitiva. Inno primo. [it.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org]

S.: Which is not the same as saying Geltrude does not begin the book.

G.: Quite. It only means that the page I can verify immediately is not the first page of the first item.

S.: A small but useful distinction. You are becoming almost editorial.

G.: Necessity degrades us all. Now, the verified opening line I can give is this: Com’uom che la sua vita ultima spende Tra i letti e le vivande, ansio più sempre Degli osceni trastulli e duramente Grave a sè stesso, con dolor rimembra... [it.wikisource.org]

S.: That is rather good.

G.: It is more than rather good. It opens as if sacred hymn were going to confess that old age, appetite, memory, and disgust are all already in the room.

S.: So not quite the chapel harmonium.

G.: No. More like a moral baritone with literary ambitions.

S.: Then you could set that.

G.: I could, though Powell would sing it as if holiness were chiefly a matter of open vowels.

S.: He would also insist on pronouncing every Italian syllable as though it had been educated at Rugby.

G.: Very likely. Still, the line has shape. It begins in lived weariness, not merely in official piety.

S.: Which already supports your suspicion that these hymns are public things rather than private prayers.

G.: Entirely. A hymn is almost never for God alone. It is for God with an audience watching itself feel.

S.: That is severe.

G.: Accurate enough to deserve severity. Rovere is writing lyrics for shared sincerity, not minutes for angels.

S.: Yet Powell said exile was itself a key signature.

G.: He did. Singers always think biography improves intonation.

S.: Does it?

G.: Only in programmes.

S.: Then what sort of music do you imagine for the opening?

G.: Something too serious for parlour piety and not serious enough for liturgy. A measured tread, perhaps, with an unexpected tenderness at rimembra.

S.: So memory before doctrine.

G.: Exactly. The line begins in recollection, not proclamation. That is musically useful.

S.: And philosophically.

G.: Of course. Sacred writing becomes interesting the moment it remembers that the soul arrives with history attached.

S.: Then Rovere is not merely writing a hymn, but staging a return.

G.: Yes, a return to an earlier purity, or what he wants to market as one.

S.: Market is perhaps ungenerous.

G.: Publicly circulate, then. Though I do not repent market.

S.: You think these hymns are for an audience wanting God, Italy, and its own sincerity in one draught.

G.: Precisely. That was my thought even before Powell brightened at the mention of Cristina di Belgiojoso.

S.: He likes names.

G.: As choirboys like incense.

S.: Then perhaps the first hymn matters less as theology than as placement.

G.: Very much so. To begin with a saint already tells us that sanctity will be handled as a public object, not merely as inward disposition.

S.: Why Geltrude first, do you suppose?

G.: One would have to see the actual text of that hymn before making grand claims. But sequence in such collections often balances devotion, variety, and implied programme.

S.: You are restraining yourself admirably.

G.: Lack of evidence occasionally makes one virtuous.

S.: And what do you make of Alla Chiesa Primitiva appearing twice, in two hymns?

G.: That is one of the most revealing things. The primitive church is not merely an object of devotion but an organising fantasy.

S.: A return to origins.

G.: Yes, and therefore also a criticism of the present. Any hymn to the primitive church is already half a complaint against the contemporary one.

S.: So even the sacred is polemical.

G.: It usually is when printed.

S.: Then perhaps your setting should make that audible.

G.: Not by banging the keyboard, if that is what you mean.

S.: No, by letting nostalgia carry a slight accusation.

G.: Exactly. A clear line, unencumbered, but with enough gravity to suggest that the singer is not only worshipping but comparing.

S.: Comparing the church that was with the church that is.

G.: Yes, and perhaps the Italy that might be with the Italy that still requires too much permission.

S.: Powell will not hear that.

G.: Singers hear feeling before structure. It is one of their few constitutional limitations.

S.: Yet he did hand you the book.

G.: He did, and that deserves some gratitude. A singer bringing a philosopher a slim Paris volume is one of civilisation’s quieter spectacles.

S.: You sound almost fond of him.

G.: Only in moderation. He prefers to think of himself as an instrument rather than a category.

S.: And you prefer to think of categories as instruments.

G.: Better than most people do, yes.

S.: Then if the first hymn is A Santa Geltrude, but the longest verified opening you can presently give is from Alla Chiesa Primitiva. Inno primo, what will you tell Powell?

G.: I shall tell him the truth, which is already more than sacred music always asks. I shall say: the collection begins with A Santa Geltrude, but the opening lines I can presently verify in full are those of Alla Chiesa Primitiva. Inno primo. [it.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org]

S.: He will ask whether that matters.

G.: I shall say: bibliographically, yes; musically, not at once.

S.: Because a good opening line can be set even if it is not the first item in the contents.

G.: Precisely. One composes to the line, not to the table of contents.

S.: Though the table of contents does flatter the line by position.

G.: It flatters the whole economy. Titles and order are the diplomacy of books.

S.: That is good.

G.: Keep it, but do not let it become too quotable.

S.: Never intentionally. Now, is there anything amusing in the publication line?

G.: Always. Paris, Per li torchii di Éverat. It is already halfway between exile and typography.

S.: And your old question whether Éverat is French for Everest.

G.: Which Powell ignored, proving again that singers are excellent at identifying which questions are merely conversational.

S.: Not every conversational question requires uptake.

G.: True. Though the good ones deserve it.

S.: Then tell me what you think a hymn is, in your driest mood.

G.: A hymn is a public utterance in which explicit doctrine is rarely the whole point, because the chorus supplies what the solo line delicately leaves distributed among piety, memory, aspiration, and civic self-recognition.

S.: That is almost an article.

G.: Heaven forbid. It is merely a defence against sentimentality.

S.: And how would Rovere fare under it?

G.: Respectably enough. He is not writing bad theology; he is writing the politics of the soul under sacred cover.

S.: Set to a tune.

G.: Exactly. Which is why Powell is happier than I am.

S.: Yet you will accompany him.

G.: I did once and may again, out of what my mother taught me was better than piety: good manners under duress.

S.: That sounds almost like one of your maxims.

G.: A remark, at any rate.

S.: Then let us return to the opening line. Com’uom che la sua vita ultima spende. It is not a bad first bar.

G.: No, because it begins in temporal exhaustion. One hears at once a late life, a spending out, a human register before sanctity has begun to preen.

S.: And then letti e vivande.

G.: Which is splendidly awkward in a sacred context. Beds and viands are not the expected furniture of a hymn unless one is about to moralise appetite.

S.: So the line begins almost in satiety.

G.: Or disgust at satiety. That is why it is musically better than a mere invocation.

S.: Better than Salve, perhaps.

G.: Far better than Salve, if one wants a mind in the room.

S.: Then Rovere’s real gift may be not piety but entry.

G.: That is well put. He knows how to begin from a recognisable human condition and rise from there toward the sacred without pretending the distance was never there.

S.: Which makes the hymn public again.

G.: Entirely. The public likes to be led from itself toward devotion, not dropped into heaven without luggage.

S.: Powell would call that expressive.

G.: Powell calls everything expressive once he can sustain it above middle C.

S.: You are merciless.

G.: Only to singers I know.

S.: Then how will you set the line?

G.: With restraint. If one over-harmonises it, one makes memory sentimental. Better to let the words do the first work and bring the accompaniment in as if recollection itself were finding footing.

S.: Almost as if the music remembered before the singer did.

G.: Yes, that is not bad.

S.: Keep it?

G.: Reluctantly.

S.: Then what does the hymn imply, before it states anything?

G.: That renewal begins in disenchantment. One remembers a purer life only after finding the present over-furnished.

S.: Beds and viands again.

G.: Yes. Appetite made tiring. That is the hinge.

S.: So the sacred emerges through criticism of excess.

G.: As it often does in serious verse. Sanctity is rarely interesting until the world has become slightly overupholstered.

S.: Oxford understands that.

G.: Oxford is built on it.

S.: Then perhaps you like Rovere more than you pretend.

G.: I like the line, which is not the same thing.

S.: But it is the beginning of the same thing.

G.: That is too singerish.

S.: I have been in bad company.

G.: Powell contaminates by proximity.

S.: And you, by precision.

G.: A better contagion. Now, one more bibliographical point. The search evidence also shows later editions and inclusion in collected Poesie, which confirms the hymns had some afterlife beyond the original Paris moment. [archive.org], [it.wikisource.org], [fr.wikipedia.org]

S.: Exile followed by republication.

G.: The usual fate of serious Italians.

S.: And of not a few English ones.

G.: Less elegantly, perhaps.

S.: Then your public-class conclusion would be?

G.: That the first inno sacro in the collection is A Santa Geltrude, while the fullest verified opening line I can presently place before the piano is from Alla Chiesa Primitiva. Inno primo: Com’uom che la sua vita ultima spende... and that the line is worth setting because it begins not in abstract sanctity but in a human disgust that seeks purification. [it.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org]

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Parisian, with a little choir-stall dust.

S.: And the punchline?

G.: If sacred hymns are the respectable form of implicature, then Powell has done the Christian thing by bringing me the book and the unchristian thing by expecting me to set the theology without first settling the contents page.

 

 

Grice: L’altro giorno, qui alla villa di Albisola, parlavo con il mio collega filosofico Speranza, che come sai ama passare di qui quando il mare aiuta il pensiero; ci siamo trovati a sorridere su quanto certe opere sembrino confessioni e invece siano esercizi di ingegno ben temperato.

Rovere: Albisola fa questo effetto: rilassa l’animo e affila la mente. E poi le confessioni, quando non chiedono assoluzione, diventano subito più interessanti.

Grice: Proprio così; e, come io e Speranza stavamo conversando su questo, ci chiedevamo entrambi se non fosse la loro genialità a consistere nel non prendere mai del tutto sul serio il proprio metafisicare, lasciando intendere più di quanto dichiarino.

Rovere: Quasi metafisica la tua implicatura, Grice, e sono certo che Speranza sarebbe d’accordo: ringrazio, perché coglie il punto senza appesantirlo. In fondo, quando la metafisica sa anche sorridere di sé, diventa confessabile senza essere penitente.