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

 

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

 

Verbali: Piana

 

Grice: Caro Piana, ma dimmi: il merlo che canta a Casale Monferrato segue la fenomenologia di Husserl o preferisce improvvisare come uno jazzista piemontese?

Piana: Grice, il merlo ha letto Husserl, ma quando trova un verme, improvvisa senza partitura! Se la musica è esperienza, il merlo è maestro – e il verme, suo premio.

Grice: Allora la ragione conversazionale dei merli è la vera scuola piemontese! Immagino Wittgenstein sotto il balcone che annota ogni cinguettio: “Questo sì che è linguaggio!”

Piana: Eh, Grice, se Wittgenstein avesse ascoltato il canto del merlo, forse avrebbe scritto “Tractatus Melodicus”! E la logica, per oggi, la lasciamo ai passerotti: almeno loro si capiscono davvero!

 

Verbali: Piccolomini

 

Grice: Che piacere, caro Piccolomini! Lo dico spesso: qualcuno preferisce un Piccolomini, ma Piccolomini è proprio il mio uomo! E non parlo di quell’altro, sia chiaro – intendo te, con tutto il bagaglio di retorica, implicature e quella brillante ironia senese.

Piccolomini: Ah, Grice, la tua preferenza mi diverte! Sai che a Siena, tra retorica e figure d'ingegno, non ci facciamo mai mancare il sorriso. Essere “l’uomo” di un filosofo inglese mi fa sentire quasi una stella – e non solo per l'alfabeto latino che ho usato!

Grice: Ecco, vedi? Persino la tua ironia la considero una figura retorica di alto livello! In fondo, è la conversazione che illumina la filosofia, non le croci d’oro dello stemma. Tu porti la luce, anche tra i “Storditi” e gli “Infiammati”.

Piccolomini: Grice, se la conversazione è una costellazione, allora ci siamo guadagnati la nostra lettera! E se la retorica può far sorridere un filosofo inglese, vuol dire che la filosofia italiana ha ancora qualcosa da insegnare – tra implicature e commedie, anche la verità può essere buffa.

 

Verbali: Piccolomini

 

Grice: Caro Piccolomini, ho appena finito di leggere il tuo commento sul “De anima” di Aristotele. Ma dimmi, tu l’anima la trovi più facilmente in biblioteca o alla trattoria senese?

Piccolomini: Ah, Grice, se l’anima fosse nascosta tra gli scaffali, l’avrei prestata e mai più ritrovata! Meglio cercarla tra un bicchiere di Chianti e due pici all’aglione: lì almeno si manifesta senza metafore.

Grice: Allora è vero che la filosofia italiana ha più sapore! Ma attento, Piccolomini: Aristotele diceva che un corpo senza anima non si muove… sarai mica tu a far danzare le pentole della cucina senese?

Piccolomini: Grice, io faccio danzare pure il cameriere, se serve! E se Aristotele avesse provato i dolci di Siena, avrebbe aggiunto un capitolo sul “De anima felice” dopo il panforte.

 

Verbali: Pico

 

G.: I have been re-reading Pico with the sort of patience one usually reserves for train timetables and impossible cousins.

S.: One should always reserve patience for Italians of quality. They return the investment with Latin.

G.: Pico returns it with conclusions. Hundreds of them. One feels, after twenty pages, that he has mistaken taxonomy for salvation.

S.: Yet Oxford keeps him alive, somehow.

G.: Alive, yes, but in the Oxford way: by successive faint reappearances, never quite by institution, always by afterlife. Pico never really got a chair. He got waves.

S.: Waves? G.: Several. I have been counting them. Since Oxford likes to say it is older than the Renaissance, it has always preferred to receive the Renaissance in delayed parcels. S.: Then begin at the beginning. G.: The beginning is not Pico in Oxford at all. The beginning is Oxford existing before the word “Renaissance” had acquired enough self-respect to travel. Bologna, Paris, Oxford: all medieval already, all pre-humanist in structure, and therefore perfectly situated to import humanism later while pretending it is merely a refinement of what was there all along. S.: The old trick: continuity after the fact. G.: Precisely. So if one wants Pico in Oxford in any direct sense, one does not get him by a don in a gown saying “today we do Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” One gets him by Italians teaching Englishmen what a better Latin life might look like. S.: Linacre. G.: Linacre first, yes. The nearest Oxford gets to touching the living Renaissance in the flesh. Oxford training first, then Italy, then Florence, then Poliziano, then back again with a better sort of confidence. S.: So Linacre knew the real thing. G.: As near as Oxford gets to it. He was not merely reading about Florence from a northern distance; he was there, and what matters for Oxford is that he appears to have been tutored in the proper way, by an Italian humanist. Oxford will recognize anything if it can be made to look like tuition. S.: The tutorial system is the only sacrament it still believes in. G.: Exactly. Linacre is intelligible to Oxford because one can say: he went out, found better teachers, and returned as a more dangerous version of himself. S.: And Pico? G.: Time-wise it works beautifully. Pico dies in 1494. Linacre’s Italian formation falls right into the later 1480s and early 1490s. Florence is not a metaphor there; it is an address. The one secure personal contact we can point to is Poliziano. Linacre becomes Poliziano’s pupil. That is enough to make Florence real. S.: And enough to make Pico possible without proving him. G.: Quite. Oxford in these matters always prefers possibility with atmosphere to proof without romance. We can securely say Linacre knew Poliziano. We can plausibly say he moved in the Medici-humanist air in which Pico was a living presence. But we cannot yet say he took tea with Pico, because Renaissance Florence did not, unfortunately, leave tea-trays in the archive. S.: Colet then? G.: Less satisfactory, which may be why he has always seemed spiritually closer to St Paul than to Poliziano. Colet goes later. He travels 1493 to 1496. By then Pico is at the edge of life, then gone. S.: So Colet is more heir than acquaintance. G.: That is exactly the right formulation. He meets the aftermath, not the man. He receives the Ficino-Pico world through writings, repute, and the late Florentine atmosphere, not necessarily through handshakes. S.: Which also suits Oxford better. Oxford likes mediated authority. G.: It likes authority to have passed through enough people to become respectable. Linacre is the vivid line. Colet is the assimilative line. S.: And both return in the 1490s. G.: Which is the first proper Oxford appropriation of the Renaissance, yes. Not because the Renaissance was then over, which is a foolish English fantasy, but because by the time Oxford imports it, Italy has already made it mature and various. S.: So the irony is not lateness after death, but lateness after development. G.: Precisely. Oxford receives the Renaissance as one receives a confident younger cousin who has already decided who he is. S.: Does Bacon enter here. G.: Only if one wants a second entrance. The first entrance is humanist, philological, Greek, biblical, rhetorical: Colet, Linacre, Erasmus-adjacent things. Bacon belongs to a later entrance, the natural-philosophical one, with Telesio in the background and anti-Aristotelian noises becoming dignified enough to travel north. S.: So Bacon is not the first channel. G.: No. He is a later and different channel. He helps import a Renaissance that has already become early modern. Through him Telesio arrives as “modernorum primus,” and Oxford begins to flatter itself that it has discovered novelty when in fact it has imported a mature Italian quarrel by a second route. S.: And Pico by then? G.: Pico has receded into emblem. One speaks of dignity, concord, theses, syncretism, magic in the learned sense, and one invokes him as a Renaissance style of mind rather than as a direct curricular author. S.: Which sounds exactly like Oxford. G.: It is exactly Oxford. Authors are often more alive as adjectives than as set texts. S.: Then comes the nineteenth century and the Germans. G.: Ah yes, the Teutonic return of the Italian. Burckhardt first in effect, though by then Pico is no longer merely an Italian humanist but a figure in a grand historical narrative called “the Renaissance,” capital letters provided by the Germans and consumed by the English. S.: Symonds. G.: Symonds is one of the great English receivers, and in an Oxford-adjacent way. Not a founder, not an original importer, but a Victorian remediator of the whole thing. He makes the Renaissance available again to an English cultivated reader as a topic one can carry in one’s luggage. S.: You mean his Renaissance in Italy. G.: Exactly. It is not the original event; it is the event in English afterlife, richly narrated, morally warmed over, and made into intellectual travel. S.: And Pater, whom I dragged in accidentally. G.: Accidentally but correctly. Pater is indispensable if one wants the Oxford Renaissance not as import but as performance. He gives you The Renaissance in 1873 and inserts Pico there as part of an Oxford aesthetic education. S.: So Pater matters as much as Symonds for the Victorian wave. G.: More for Oxford proper, I should think. Symonds is magnificent in bulk and reach, but Pater is the one who makes the Renaissance an Oxford manner. He reads essays in Oxford, he turns art and Renaissance individuality into cultivated inwardness, and thereby makes Pico available not as a scholastic curiosity but as part of an aesthetic-intellectual sensibility. S.: And yet the chairs remain with boring men. G.: There is the joke. Oxford can aestheticize the Renaissance without reinstating it institutionally. The Waynflete chair line in Pater’s time gives you not Pico restored to authority, but Mansel, Chandler, Case, later John Alexander Smith, and then much later Collingwood. S.: Chandler particularly sounds like a man who would file Pico under “miscellaneous enthusiasm.” G.: Precisely. The chairs never quite become Renaissance chairs. The Renaissance enters Oxford through criticism, essays, travel, reading, not through a formal re-foundation of metaphysical authority. S.: So Pater and Symonds are waves, not institutions. G.: Very good. That is the entire history in miniature. Pico in Oxford is mostly wave and afterwave. S.: Then Bosanquet? G.: A short bridge, not a long one. If you want to connect the aesthetic school to idealism, Bosanquet is the best plank. Pater is not Bradley in silk; Bosanquet at least allows aesthetics into idealism without turning it wholly decorative. S.: So the line is not Pater to Bradley directly. G.: No, too strong. Better: Pater contributes to an atmosphere of serious culture, inwardness, and aesthetic ideality in late Victorian Oxford; Bosanquet gives one philosophical aesthetics inside idealism; Bradley remains metaphysically larger and aesthetically less immediate. S.: And Grice later grows up under the anti-idealist reaction to all of this. G.: Under the reaction, yes, but not under amnesia. Oxford never forgets enough to be honest. It replaces without erasing. So by Grice’s period you still have Collingwood as a bridge figure, still carrying historicist and idealist seriousness in the Waynflete chair before Ryle’s appointment in 1945 institutionalises the new severity. S.: So if one wanted to dramatise it, one could say: Pater gives Oxford a Renaissance mood; Bosanquet gives it an aesthetic metaphysic; Collingwood keeps alive the historical-intellectual dignity of the old atmosphere; Ryle then sweeps the carpets and puts the furniture in straight lines. G.: Very good, though too kind to Ryle. He did more than straighten the furniture; he made old upholstery sound dishonest. S.: And Grice suffers under that. G.: Suffers and profits, which is the proper Oxford balance. One always suffers under what one later refines. S.: Return then to Pico himself. How many waves did you count. G.: Let me see. First wave: the living Italian-humanist contact through Linacre and, in a weaker way, Colet in the 1490s. Second wave: the Baconian-natural-philosophical later Renaissance route, though more Telesio than Pico directly. Third wave: the Victorian historical-aesthetic recovery through Symonds. Fourth: Pater’s Oxford aesthetic internalisation, including the Pico chapter. Fifth: the early twentieth-century and interwar history-of-ideas treatment, mostly through Burckhardt’s shadow and Germanic apparatus. Sixth: the postwar anthology-and-scholarship wave—Cassirer, Kristeller, Garin, and that 1948 anthology making Pico standard Anglophone Renaissance philosophy. S.: The sixth wave, if you have been counting them. G.: Exactly. The 1948 collection is particularly useful for my purposes, because by then Pico is not merely alive in a vague cultural way; he is anthologized, edited, presented as one of the standing names in “Renaissance Philosophy.” S.: Which means that by Grice’s Oxford years Pico is available. G.: Available, yes. Central, no. Alive as a known name in Renaissance humanism, yes. A routine author for Greats, certainly not. A living comparative point for someone with enough curiosity and enough bibliographical vice, certainly. S.: And Grice had both. G.: Curiosity and vice, yes. Enough to make an occasional joke about conclusiones and the multiplicative habits of Italians. S.: The title Conclusiones must have pleased him. G.: Immensely. It gives him a verb to overwork. For what is reasoning, after all, if not concluding, and what is Pico but a man who mistakes the product of reasoning for a distributable genre. S.: And Benivieni. G.: Ah, Benivieni belongs to the other side of the story, the more intimate Florentine side, where Pico is not a textbook but a friend, an elegy, a local intellectual weather. That side does not really enter Oxford directly. Oxford receives the printed Pico, not the Florentine sorrow. S.: Which is a pity. G.: Oxford is excellent at pity once it has been translated into a lecture. S.: Then what should our conclusion be. G.: That Pico’s influence on Oxford is real but mostly indirect, cumulative, and repeatedly mediated. He never becomes, in the strict institutional sense, re-installed. He is not re-founded into the chairs. He arrives by humanist contact, returns by historical narrative, is aestheticized by Pater, systematized by German and later Italian scholarship, and finally becomes part of the cultivated Renaissance repertoire available to an Oxford philosopher of Grice’s years. S.: In other words, he keeps speaking, but never from the podium. G.: Precisely. He speaks from the margins, from anthologies, essays, afterlives, and successive waves of civilised recovery. Which may be the best way for Pico to speak. A man of nine hundred theses would be intolerable with a permanent chair. S.: And Linacre remains the one who knew the real thing. G.: The nearest Oxford got, yes. Linacre at least had the advantage of Italian tuition and Florentine air. Colet has the writings. Bacon has the later natural-philosophical detour. Symonds has the Victorian rediscovery. Pater has the Oxford style. Burckhardt and Cassirer have the grand framing. The 1948 anthology has the postwar domestication. And meanwhile the chairs remain with perfectly competent men who would never have allowed Pico to run the timetable. S.: So here we are, with Pico left behind. G.: Left behind institutionally, yes. But still walking about the place in a perfectly Oxford way: not as a requirement, but as a name one ought to know if one wishes to sound as if one has not merely read philosophy but inherited civilisation.

 

Grice: Caro Pico, la tua ragione conversazionale mi lascia sempre a bocca aperta! Dimmi, è vero che in Mirandola si discute anche col demonio, o è solo una leggenda?

Pico: Grice, qui il demonio è solo uno studente fuoricorso! Ma credimi, tra Benivieni e Ficino, a volte preferisco discutere con le streghe: almeno non correggono i miei latinismi!

Grice: Ma allora è vero che a Mirandola l’amore platonico si trasforma in magia? Dicono che l’accademia sia piena di apprendisti stregoni... e qualcuno anche sodomita!

Pico: Grice, qui siamo filosofi: la magia la lasciamo ai poeti e la sodomia agli invidiosi! In accademia preferiamo le implicature: almeno, se sbagliamo, possiamo dire che era ironia!

 

Verbali: Pico

 

G.: Trinity, 1964. I have been re-reading Pico with the sort of patience one usually reserves for train timetables and impossible cousins.

S.: One should always reserve patience for Italians of quality. They return the investment with Latin.

G.: Pico returns it with conclusions. Hundreds of them. One feels, after twenty pages, that he has mistaken taxonomy for salvation.

S.: Yet Oxford keeps him alive, somehow. G.: Alive, yes, but in the Oxford way: by successive faint reappearances, never quite by institution, always by afterlife. Pico never really got a chair. He got waves. S.: Waves? G.: Several. I have been counting them. Since Oxford likes to say it is older than the Renaissance, it has always preferred to receive the Renaissance in delayed parcels. S.: Then begin at the beginning. G.: The beginning is not Pico in Oxford at all. The beginning is Oxford existing before the word “Renaissance” had acquired enough self-respect to travel. Bologna, Paris, Oxford: all medieval already, all pre-humanist in structure, and therefore perfectly situated to import humanism later while pretending it is merely a refinement of what was there all along. S.: The old trick: continuity after the fact. G.: Precisely. So if one wants Pico in Oxford in any direct sense, one does not get him by a don in a gown saying “today we do Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” One gets him by Italians teaching Englishmen what a better Latin life might look like. S.: Linacre. G.: Linacre first, yes. The nearest Oxford gets to touching the living Renaissance in the flesh. Oxford training first, then Italy, then Florence, then Poliziano, then back again with a better sort of confidence. S.: So Linacre knew the real thing. G.: As near as Oxford gets to it. He was not merely reading about Florence from a northern distance; he was there, and what matters for Oxford is that he appears to have been tutored in the proper way, by an Italian humanist. Oxford will recognize anything if it can be made to look like tuition. S.: The tutorial system is the only sacrament it still believes in. G.: Exactly. Linacre is intelligible to Oxford because one can say: he went out, found better teachers, and returned as a more dangerous version of himself. S.: And Pico? G.: Time-wise it works beautifully. Pico dies in 1494. Linacre’s Italian formation falls right into the later 1480s and early 1490s. Florence is not a metaphor there; it is an address. The one secure personal contact we can point to is Poliziano. Linacre becomes Poliziano’s pupil. That is enough to make Florence real. S.: And enough to make Pico possible without proving him. G.: Quite. Oxford in these matters always prefers possibility with atmosphere to proof without romance. We can securely say Linacre knew Poliziano. We can plausibly say he moved in the Medici-humanist air in which Pico was a living presence. But we cannot yet say he took tea with Pico, because Renaissance Florence did not, unfortunately, leave tea-trays in the archive. S.: Colet then? G.: Less satisfactory, which may be why he has always seemed spiritually closer to St Paul than to Poliziano. Colet goes later. He travels 1493 to 1496. By then Pico is at the edge of life, then gone. S.: So Colet is more heir than acquaintance. G.: That is exactly the right formulation. He meets the aftermath, not the man. He receives the Ficino-Pico world through writings, repute, and the late Florentine atmosphere, not necessarily through handshakes. S.: Which also suits Oxford better. Oxford likes mediated authority. G.: It likes authority to have passed through enough people to become respectable. Linacre is the vivid line. Colet is the assimilative line. S.: And both return in the 1490s. G.: Which is the first proper Oxford appropriation of the Renaissance, yes. Not because the Renaissance was then over, which is a foolish English fantasy, but because by the time Oxford imports it, Italy has already made it mature and various. S.: So the irony is not lateness after death, but lateness after development. G.: Precisely. Oxford receives the Renaissance as one receives a confident younger cousin who has already decided who he is. S.: Does Bacon enter here. G.: Only if one wants a second entrance. The first entrance is humanist, philological, Greek, biblical, rhetorical: Colet, Linacre, Erasmus-adjacent things. Bacon belongs to a later entrance, the natural-philosophical one, with Telesio in the background and anti-Aristotelian noises becoming dignified enough to travel north. S.: So Bacon is not the first channel. G.: No. He is a later and different channel. He helps import a Renaissance that has already become early modern. Through him Telesio arrives as “modernorum primus,” and Oxford begins to flatter itself that it has discovered novelty when in fact it has imported a mature Italian quarrel by a second route. S.: And Pico by then? G.: Pico has receded into emblem. One speaks of dignity, concord, theses, syncretism, magic in the learned sense, and one invokes him as a Renaissance style of mind rather than as a direct curricular author. S.: Which sounds exactly like Oxford. G.: It is exactly Oxford. Authors are often more alive as adjectives than as set texts. S.: Then comes the nineteenth century and the Germans. G.: Ah yes, the Teutonic return of the Italian. Burckhardt first in effect, though by then Pico is no longer merely an Italian humanist but a figure in a grand historical narrative called “the Renaissance,” capital letters provided by the Germans and consumed by the English. S.: Symonds. G.: Symonds is one of the great English receivers, and in an Oxford-adjacent way. Not a founder, not an original importer, but a Victorian remediator of the whole thing. He makes the Renaissance available again to an English cultivated reader as a topic one can carry in one’s luggage. S.: You mean his Renaissance in Italy. G.: Exactly. It is not the original event; it is the event in English afterlife, richly narrated, morally warmed over, and made into intellectual travel. S.: And Pater, whom I dragged in accidentally. G.: Accidentally but correctly. Pater is indispensable if one wants the Oxford Renaissance not as import but as performance. He gives you The Renaissance in 1873 and inserts Pico there as part of an Oxford aesthetic education. S.: So Pater matters as much as Symonds for the Victorian wave. G.: More for Oxford proper, I should think. Symonds is magnificent in bulk and reach, but Pater is the one who makes the Renaissance an Oxford manner. He reads essays in Oxford, he turns art and Renaissance individuality into cultivated inwardness, and thereby makes Pico available not as a scholastic curiosity but as part of an aesthetic-intellectual sensibility. S.: And yet the chairs remain with boring men. G.: There is the joke. Oxford can aestheticize the Renaissance without reinstating it institutionally. The Waynflete chair line in Pater’s time gives you not Pico restored to authority, but Mansel, Chandler, Case, later John Alexander Smith, and then much later Collingwood. S.: Chandler particularly sounds like a man who would file Pico under “miscellaneous enthusiasm.” G.: Precisely. The chairs never quite become Renaissance chairs. The Renaissance enters Oxford through criticism, essays, travel, reading, not through a formal re-foundation of metaphysical authority. S.: So Pater and Symonds are waves, not institutions. G.: Very good. That is the entire history in miniature. Pico in Oxford is mostly wave and afterwave. S.: Then Bosanquet? G.: A short bridge, not a long one. If you want to connect the aesthetic school to idealism, Bosanquet is the best plank. Pater is not Bradley in silk; Bosanquet at least allows aesthetics into idealism without turning it wholly decorative. S.: So the line is not Pater to Bradley directly. G.: No, too strong. Better: Pater contributes to an atmosphere of serious culture, inwardness, and aesthetic ideality in late Victorian Oxford; Bosanquet gives one philosophical aesthetics inside idealism; Bradley remains metaphysically larger and aesthetically less immediate. S.: And Grice later grows up under the anti-idealist reaction to all of this. G.: Under the reaction, yes, but not under amnesia. Oxford never forgets enough to be honest. It replaces without erasing. So by Grice’s period you still have Collingwood as a bridge figure, still carrying historicist and idealist seriousness in the Waynflete chair before Ryle’s appointment in 1945 institutionalises the new severity. S.: So if one wanted to dramatise it, one could say: Pater gives Oxford a Renaissance mood; Bosanquet gives it an aesthetic metaphysic; Collingwood keeps alive the historical-intellectual dignity of the old atmosphere; Ryle then sweeps the carpets and puts the furniture in straight lines. G.: Very good, though too kind to Ryle. He did more than straighten the furniture; he made old upholstery sound dishonest. S.: And Grice suffers under that. G.: Suffers and profits, which is the proper Oxford balance. One always suffers under what one later refines. S.: Return then to Pico himself. How many waves did you count. G.: Let me see. First wave: the living Italian-humanist contact through Linacre and, in a weaker way, Colet in the 1490s. Second wave: the Baconian-natural-philosophical later Renaissance route, though more Telesio than Pico directly. Third wave: the Victorian historical-aesthetic recovery through Symonds. Fourth: Pater’s Oxford aesthetic internalisation, including the Pico chapter. Fifth: the early twentieth-century and interwar history-of-ideas treatment, mostly through Burckhardt’s shadow and Germanic apparatus. Sixth: the postwar anthology-and-scholarship wave—Cassirer, Kristeller, Garin, and that 1948 anthology making Pico standard Anglophone Renaissance philosophy. S.: The sixth wave, if you have been counting them. G.: Exactly. The 1948 collection is particularly useful for my purposes, because by then Pico is not merely alive in a vague cultural way; he is anthologized, edited, presented as one of the standing names in “Renaissance Philosophy.” S.: Which means that by Grice’s Oxford years Pico is available. G.: Available, yes. Central, no. Alive as a known name in Renaissance humanism, yes. A routine author for Greats, certainly not. A living comparative point for someone with enough curiosity and enough bibliographical vice, certainly. S.: And Grice had both. G.: Curiosity and vice, yes. Enough to make an occasional joke about conclusiones and the multiplicative habits of Italians. S.: The title Conclusiones must have pleased him. G.: Immensely. It gives him a verb to overwork. For what is reasoning, after all, if not concluding, and what is Pico but a man who mistakes the product of reasoning for a distributable genre. S.: And Benivieni. G.: Ah, Benivieni belongs to the other side of the story, the more intimate Florentine side, where Pico is not a textbook but a friend, an elegy, a local intellectual weather. That side does not really enter Oxford directly. Oxford receives the printed Pico, not the Florentine sorrow. S.: Which is a pity. G.: Oxford is excellent at pity once it has been translated into a lecture. S.: Then what should our conclusion be. G.: That Pico’s influence on Oxford is real but mostly indirect, cumulative, and repeatedly mediated. He never becomes, in the strict institutional sense, re-installed. He is not re-founded into the chairs. He arrives by humanist contact, returns by historical narrative, is aestheticized by Pater, systematized by German and later Italian scholarship, and finally becomes part of the cultivated Renaissance repertoire available to an Oxford philosopher of Grice’s years. S.: In other words, he keeps speaking, but never from the podium. G.: Precisely. He speaks from the margins, from anthologies, essays, afterlives, and successive waves of civilised recovery. Which may be the best way for Pico to speak. A man of nine hundred theses would be intolerable with a permanent chair. S.: And Linacre remains the one who knew the real thing. G.: The nearest Oxford got, yes. Linacre at least had the advantage of Italian tuition and Florentine air. Colet has the writings. Bacon has the later natural-philosophical detour. Symonds has the Victorian rediscovery. Pater has the Oxford style. Burckhardt and Cassirer have the grand framing. The 1948 anthology has the postwar domestication. And meanwhile the chairs remain with perfectly competent men who would never have allowed Pico to run the timetable. S.: So here we are, with Pico left behind. G.: Left behind institutionally, yes. But still walking about the place in a perfectly Oxford way: not as a requirement, but as a name one ought to know if one wishes to sound as if one has not merely read philosophy but inherited civilisation.

 

Grice: Caro Pico, la tua ragione conversazionale mi lascia sempre a bocca aperta! Dimmi, è vero che in Mirandola si discute anche col demonio, o è solo una leggenda?

Pico: Grice, qui il demonio è solo uno studente fuoricorso! Ma credimi, tra Benivieni e Ficino, a volte preferisco discutere con le streghe: almeno non correggono i miei latinismi!

Grice: Ma allora è vero che a Mirandola l’amore platonico si trasforma in magia? Dicono che l’accademia sia piena di apprendisti stregoni... e qualcuno anche sodomita!

Pico: Grice, qui siamo filosofi: la magia la lasciamo ai poeti e la sodomia agli invidiosi! In accademia preferiamo le implicature: almeno, se sbagliamo, possiamo dire che era ironia!

 

Verbali: Pieralisi

 

Grice: Pieralisi, mi dica: se io segno con il dito la tazza del tè, è segno naturale o artificiale? E soprattutto, la tazza deve preoccuparsi?

Pieralisi: Caro Grice, se la tazza tremasse, sarebbe un segno naturale! Ma se arrossisse, probabilmente è un segno artificiale inventato dagli inglesi per confondere noi filosofi marchigiani.

Grice: Allora mi chiedo: se il mio cane mi guarda quando apro la credenza, è segno che ha capito la conversazione o sta solo segnando dove sono i biscotti?

Pieralisi: Grice, in questo caso il cane usa la massima della conversazione: “Evita l’ambiguità, segna i biscotti!” Se fosse filosofo, ti chiederebbe anche una tazza di tè – senza arrossire.

 

Verbali: Pieri

 

Grice: Pieri, ho sempre trovato affascinante il modo in cui la sua riflessione matematica sfocia nella poesia, e viceversa. Mi incuriosisce come lei veda il rapporto tra rigore logico e creatività nell’elaborazione dei fondamenti geometrici. Esiste davvero una linea di confine netta, o sono le due attività due facce della stessa medaglia?

Pieri: Caro Grice, la sua domanda coglie nel segno: per me, logica e creatività sono intrecciate come i fili di un arazzo toscano. La matematica, come la poesia, nasce da uno sguardo che sa andare oltre l’apparenza, e solo attraverso questa tensione tra ordine e immaginazione si giunge all’eleganza di una dimostrazione davvero bella.

Grice: È proprio vero, Pieri. Lei dimostra che anche nelle “implicature”, quelle sfumature del significato che restano nascoste dietro ai segni—negazione, congiunzione, disgiunzione—c’è una ricchezza quasi poetica. Le è mai capitato di “sentire” una soluzione matematica prima ancora di formalizzarla, come un’intuizione improvvisa?

Pieri: Eccome, caro collega! A volte è proprio un lampo, come un endecasillabo che prende forma nella mente. Poi, certo, viene il lavoro, il travaglio di costringere quell’idea nella formula, come dicevo citando Leopardi. Ma senza quell’istante ispirato, la matematica sarebbe solo contabilità senz’anima. E lei, Grice, non trova che anche nella conversazione si celino formule eleganti, se appena le sappiamo ascoltare?

 

Verbali: Pini

 

“Grice: St John’s, 1951. The Ashmolean is running a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition—“Vinci,” as I persist in calling him, as if he were a neighbour with a surname—and Blackwell’s has obligingly placed in the window a formidable tome by one Pini: La vita e le opere di Leonardo da Vinci. Potts went too, and between his enthusiasm and my weakness for catalogues our tutorial was largely swallowed by Renaissance memorabilia.

“He was a Renaissance man,” Potts said, and then—anticipating my objection—added, “if that’s what I’m implying.” “He was,” I said, “but be careful: ‘Renaissance man’ is a phrase generally used by people who are not Renaissance men. As a description it often tells you more about the speaker than about Leonardo.” Potts frowned politely. “I don’t follow, sir.” “You needn’t,” I said. “It’s enough to notice that some labels are less informative about their subject than they are revealing of the labeler. ‘Renaissance man’ can be a compliment, but it can also be an advertisement of one’s own taste for compliments.” He brightened at that, so I pressed my luck: “For next week, write on this: why the only man who can do philosophy is, in a sense, a Renaissance man—yet why doing philosophy is not at all the same thing as doing Renaissance philosophy.” “Very well, sir,” Potts said, with the unnerving cheerfulness of someone who suspects he has just been given a paradox and is looking forward to living in it.”

 

Grice: Caro Pini, ho letto della tua giovinezza travagliata e della tua passione per la giustizia sociale. Mi incuriosisce come la tua esperienza tra le tipografie e il mondo operaio abbia influenzato il tuo pensiero filosofico. Come hai conciliato la lotta quotidiana con la ricerca della verità? 

Pini: Grice, la realtà dura delle mie origini non mi ha lasciato alternative: la filosofia, per me, è sempre stata azione. Ho imparato presto che la parola può essere arma e ponte insieme. La mia partecipazione agli scioperi e all’Internazionale dei lavoratori mi ha insegnato che la verità non è solo da pensare, ma da vivere, anche attraverso il rischio e la ribellione. 

Grice: In effetti, il tuo radicalismo e la scelta di esproprio come strumento rivoluzionario mi ricordano che la filosofia può diventare prassi concreta, persino eroica. Ma dimmi, come vedi oggi il rapporto tra individualismo e collettivo? È ancora possibile trovare una sintesi autentica o siamo condannati alla frammentazione? 

Pini: La sintesi, Grice, è difficile ma necessaria. Ognuno di noi deve essere libero di esprimere il proprio pensiero, ma la vera rivoluzione si fa insieme, non da soli. Mi piace pensare che “gli intransigenti”, “i ribelli”, siano la prova che l’individualismo può diventare forza collettiva quando è guidato dalla passione per la libertà e la giustizia. Dopotutto, come si dice dalle mie parti, “da soli si va veloci, insieme si va lontano”.

 

Verbali: Piovani

 

G.: Caro Piovani, mi chiedevo: il tuo “assenzialismo” nasce dal bisogno di dare un nome alle cose che nessuno capisce, o è solo una raffinata scusa per confondere gli studenti?

Piovani: Ah, G, se confondere fosse un’arte, saremmo entrambi premi Nobel! In realtà, l’assenzialismo è la mia risposta filosofica al caos napoletano: se non trovi la risposta, inventa la domanda!

G.: Geniale! Io pensavo che il linguaggio ordinario fosse già abbastanza complicato, ma tu lo hai reso straordinario. Non temere, nessuno a Oxford ha ancora capito cosa sia un’implicatura assente.

Piovani: Perfetto! Allora possiamo fondare una nuova scuola: “I filosofi della confusione cordiale”. A Napoli si dice, “Chi si confonde si diverte”... almeno finché non arriva l’esame!

Verbali: Pirro

 

Grice: Caro Vincenzo, ho letto che ti piace rovesciare le implicature come si rovesciano le orecchiette. Ma dimmi, il fascismo filosofico era più al dente o scotto?

Pirro: Grice, dipende dal cuoco! Gentile preferiva tutto ben cotto, tranne le idee, che lasciava sempre un po’ crude per far discutere i commensali. E poi, se la filosofia non fa fermentare, che filosofia è?

Grice: Hai ragione, Vincenzo! Ma dimmi, nelle tue ricerche storiche, hai mai trovato la ricetta segreta per evitare la damnatio memoriae? Chissà, magari basta aggiungere un pizzico di ironia!

Pirro: Ah Grice, se bastasse l’ironia, l’Italia sarebbe il paese più ricordato al mondo! Ma, come si dice dalle mie parti, “chi semina storia raccoglie polemica”... e qualche applauso al museo archeologico!

 

Verbali: Pizzorno

 

Grice: Caro Pizzorno, ho letto dei tuoi studi sulla razionalizzazione e le classi sociali. Ma dimmi: hai mai pensato che la filosofia del sindacato abbia qualcosa in comune con la logica delle conversazioni? Magari anche il sindacalista segue le mie massime!

Pizzorno: Grice, se il sindacalista seguisse le tue massime, forse la trattativa sarebbe più breve... ma senza un po’ di teatrino, che gusto c’è? Sai, la razionalità va bene, ma in Italia anche il dialogo ha bisogno di una maschera!

Grice: Ah, la maschera! Dalla filosofia alla commedia dell’arte, siete imbattibili. Mi sa che dovrò aggiungere una massima: "Non dire tutto, ma fai capire abbastanza... e sorridi!"

Pizzorno: Perfetto, Grice. La prossima volta che un sindacalista mi rimprovera, gli dirò che è questione di implicatura – e se non capisce, lo mando a Torino a studiare con te!