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

 

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

 

 

Verbali: Re

 

 

G.: Del Re again, and I still maintain that mathematics is blue-collar even when printed in Naples with enough capitals to frighten a dean.

S.: You are unjust on purpose.

G.: Of course. Justice is for public occasions. At present I want to know why a man of determinants, omographies, Hamiltonians, and spaces of n dimensions should be allowed near dialectic at all.

S.: Because he taught logic, among other things.

G.: So did schoolmasters, and I did not therefore call them geometers.

S.: But Del Re is not merely a geometer dabbling in syllogisms. He belongs to that post-Peano world in which logic becomes newly formal without wholly ceasing to be philosophical.

G.: Exactly my complaint. Dialectica was a liberal art. It concerned argument, contradiction, division, commonplaces, consequence, perhaps a little deception under civic pressure. There was nothing intrinsically mathematica about it.

S.: Until Frege.

G.: It was all Frege’s fault, and only less so Peano’s.

S.: Less so because Del Re is more Peanoian than Fregean.

G.: I grant the point and remain annoyed.

S.: Peano at least came from a culture that liked signs without pretending they had abolished the rest of civilisation.

G.: That is too kind to Turin.

S.: Yet Del Re’s very titles give him away. Lezioni di algebra della logica, Sulla indipendenza dei postulati della logica, La logica ha un carattere universalmente unitario? These are not imported fragments from Jena. They are post-Peano dissemination in an Italian academic key.

G.: Dissemination is itself a suspiciously agricultural word.

S.: More blue-collar than you care to admit.

G.: Exactly. One disseminates grain, algebra, and unfortunate enthusiasms.

S.: Del Re did all three respectably enough. A hundred pamphlets, lectures in Naples, Rome, Modena, Reggio, work in geometry of transformations, algebra of logic, and all the rest. He was one of those men who spread the formal disease without ever fully abandoning the old university civility.

G.: A contagion in frock coat.

S.: Better that than in shirtsleeves. You object because once logic becomes symbolic, language itself begins to look like a machine.

G.: Quite. “If language has a logic” is one thing. “If language is logic in shabby clothes” is another. The latter is usually nonsense written by clean men.

S.: Yet you are not wholly innocent of structure.

G.: Certainly not. I like structure when it stays in its place.

S.: And what is its place?

G.: As servant, not sovereign. The dictum may be represented. It need not be replaced.

S.: Then let us take Del Re’s own temptation. If two descriptions share a projection but differ in underlying configuration, he says, one must train the eye not to trust the first profile.

G.: Yes, yes, stereoscopy, osculating planes, all that. A very pretty way of making conversation into descriptive geometry.

S.: It is more than pretty. He suggests that what is overtly said may be flat, while the real significance appears only from another perspective.

G.: Which is my point about implicature, only without the Euclidean bragging.

S.: He would say without the social reduction.

G.: Nonsense. Without the social there is no implicature at all, only underdetermined notation.

S.: He would answer that rational understanding depends on structure, invariance, and form, and that conversation is no exception.

G.: Of course it depends on structure. So does a teapot. The question is whether one gets from there to actual linguistic life.

S.: Austin would say no, or at least not directly.

G.: Austin would say several noes before breakfast and all of them in different tones. He had a healthy distrust of imported neatness.

S.: Yet Austin loved examples that looked almost formal once properly cleaned.

G.: Yes, but he never mistook cleaning for carpentry.

S.: Very good.

G.: Keep it if you must. The trouble with Del Re and his sort is not that they notice formal relations, but that they come to think language itself secretly yearns to be mathematical.

S.: That is unfair to Del Re. He asks whether logic has a universally unitary character. That is not the same as saying language does.

G.: But it is close enough to the prejudice of Einheit von Wissenschaft to make one nervous.

S.: Ah yes, your Viennese bogeyman.

G.: Not bogeyman, merely travelling salesman. The unity of science fantasy encourages one to think that all discourse worth taking seriously tends toward one purified medium.

S.: And you think ordinary language resists that.

G.: Naturally. Not only resists it; lives by not being it.

S.: Yet Peano himself was not simply a unity-of-science ideologue. He wanted exact signs, yes, but he also had a schoolmaster’s sense that one must teach by notation because language wanders.

G.: A schoolmaster’s vice.

S.: A philosopher’s necessity, at times.

G.: Let us distinguish. If I say “if,” the vernacular already gives me something richer than the horseshoe. If Peano replaces it with his sign, he gives me a useful abstraction. If Del Re then asks whether language has a logic under that abstraction, he risks mistaking the abstraction for the living thing.

S.: Strawson would applaud that.

G.: He usually does when he can blame mathematics by way of ordinary English.

S.: And yet you too distinguish dictum from implicature, the explicit from the extra, what is said from what is meant. That sounds almost like structure.

G.: It is structure, but of a social-rational sort, not a merely formal or geometric one.

S.: What do you mean by “social-rational sort”?

G.: That the relation is mediated by speakers, hearers, intentions, cooperative assumptions, and practical reason. Del Re wants hidden architecture. I want accountable uptake.

S.: You can have both.

G.: In principle, yes, but one must know which side is primary. For him the projection suggests depth-of-field. For me the utterance plus circumstances plus rational presumption yield the implicature.

S.: He would say that changing perspective is itself part of rational uptake.

G.: Very likely. Italians do love a perspective when it can be made philosophical.

S.: Especially after geometry has been in the room.

G.: Exactly. But what does Del Re care? What does he know of the actual life of saying one thing and meaning another over lunch, over tea, in the Senate, in a tutorial?

S.: He taught, after all, and a great many of his lectures were precisely attempts to make formal matters intelligible to audiences that were not born speaking determinants.

G.: You are defending him like a publisher.

S.: Only like a fair reader. He was born in Calitri, studied in Naples, moved through Rome, Modena, Reggio, back to Naples, even the military school. He wrote over a hundred pamphlet-sized pieces. That is not the career of an aloof system-builder. That is dissemination in the old university sense.

G.: Again this blue-collar word.

S.: Exactly why it fits. He was a diffuser of post-Peano technique across places where philosophy, mathematics, military instruction, and public lectures all touched.

G.: Bologna did not study him.

S.: Nor should it necessarily have done, if by Bologna you mean the great humanist-philosophical self-image of Bologna. But modern Italian logic and mathematical culture could hardly ignore men like him.

G.: They could and often did, with taste.

S.: Taste is not always history.

G.: No, but it improves it. Why should we even listen to Del Re on conversation?

S.: Because sometimes a geometer sees what a moralist sentimentalises. He sees that one surface can carry multiple structures, that coincidence in projection is not identity in depth, that invariance matters, that viewpoint matters, that form survives transformation.

G.: And he therefore thinks conversation is an n-dimensional body viewed by one eye.

S.: More or less.

G.: Which is a very poor account of irony.

S.: Only if one forgets the second eye.

G.: Ah yes, his stereoscopy. Conversation requires two eyes, one for the said and one for the rest.

S.: That is almost your own point.

G.: It is my point after being forced to wear goggles.

S.: Not entirely. Del Re’s thought is that the overt linguistic projection can underdetermine the deeper configuration. A hearer or interlocutor must vary viewpoint, compare invariants, and recover the structure. That is not wholly alien to your idea that the utterance underdetermines the meant.

G.: Not wholly alien, no. But he does not give me speaker-meaning. He gives me a formal metaphor.

S.: Sometimes a good metaphor is half a theory.

G.: Sometimes it is a quarter of one and demands full payment.

S.: You are especially harsh on metaphors that come from mathematics.

G.: Because they arrive with credentials and leave with hostages.

S.: Then let us be plain. Does language have a logic?

G.: In one sense yes, in another no. There are inferential relations, semantic structures, formal features, syntactic regularities, logical forms, all of which justify speaking of a logic of language. But if you mean that ordinary language in use is exhausted by a formal skeleton, then emphatically no.

S.: Del Re would not say exhausted.

G.: He comes perilously close when he speaks of universal unity, fundamental forms, independence of postulates, and all the rest.

S.: Yet even his title La logica ha un carattere universalmente unitario? is a question, not a decree.

G.: A very professorial question, which means he wants the decree to look hesitant.

S.: You are in no mood to be charitable.

G.: I am always charitable after proper distinctions have been made.

S.: Then make one. Between Frege and Peano, since you drag them in as culprits.

G.: Gladly. Frege seeks the deep logical articulation of thought and the language adequate to it. Peano seeks a notational discipline capable of standardising expression and calculation. Frege is metaphysically heavier, Peano pedagogically harder. Del Re, being more Peanoian, inherits notation, postulates, independence, formal procedures, dissemination through lectures and pamphlets.

S.: Not the whole Fregean burden of sense, reference, concept, object, and anti-psychologism.

G.: No, not the whole burden, though enough remains to make the philosophers nervous.

S.: Whitehead and Russell appealed to me for similar reasons.

G.: I know. They gave you the feeling that philosophy might be exact without becoming wholly inhuman.

S.: A feeling I still have.

G.: Yes, though I should say exactness becomes dangerous when it begins to think itself humane by nature.

S.: Del Re may be guilty of many things, but not of thinking himself humane by nature. He is too busy proving, transforming, projecting, and decomposing.

G.: Exactly. Blue-collar in the worst sense.

S.: Or the best. He works. He does not merely sublime. Relazione tra due determinanti in 1881, then pamphlet after pamphlet, lectures on the algebra of logic, on the forms of space, on Kant and Strawson rigato, on postulates, on stereoscopy, on n-dimensional rigid bodies, on Hamiltonians and gradients.

G.: You list them with the tone of a museum guide.

S.: I list them because he deserves at least the dignity of his own catalogue.

G.: Very well. He deserves his catalogue. But what have any of these to do with Austin on excuses?

S.: More than you think. Austin shows that ordinary discourse depends on fine discriminations, on what follows from what in a situation, on how description varies with purpose. Del Re shows that equivalence in one representation need not survive transformation, and that one must test structural relations rather than trust appearances.

G.: That is geometry pretending to be common sense.

S.: Or common sense discovering geometry too late.

G.: You are incorrigible.

S.: Only in defence of the pamphleteers. Del Re’s very pamphlet form matters. He was not writing one monumental logic to bury Italy. He was scattering formal lessons into the culture.

G.: Dissemination again.

S.: Exactly. A blue-collar virtue if ever there was one.

G.: You are determined to keep the image.

S.: Because it irritates you. Also because it is true. He did the carrying work between the symbolic initiatives of Turin and the more mixed philosophical and pedagogic settings of Naples, Rome, Modena, and beyond.

G.: Beyond to where? The army?

S.: Even there. He taught at the military school. Formal reasoning does not lose its dignity because cadets see it.

G.: It may lose a little glamour.

S.: That never harmed philosophy.

G.: Then tell me, if language has a logic and conversation has implicatures, what does Del Re give us that a decent ordinary-language philosopher lacks?

S.: An image of structural underdetermination without sentimentalism. He reminds us that flatness can be deceptive, that what appears coincident may differ essentially, that depth is recovered by method, not by sighing.

G.: Very pretty again.

S.: Yes, but usable. Suppose two utterances are extensionally similar in what is said. One is bare refusal, the other refusal with regret, or refusal with rebuke, or refusal with invitation deferred. The overt linguistic profile can be nearly the same. What differs is the deeper configuration of force and implication.

G.: That sounds more like my territory at last.

S.: Exactly. Del Re’s perspective-talk gives one a harmlessly geometric metaphor for your own insistence that the said underdetermines the meant.

G.: Harmlessly? There is no harmless geometry once philosophers adopt it.

S.: Better geometry than transcendence in this case.

G.: Fair. Still, I should like to keep “explicature” out of the room entirely.

S.: That is because you dislike bad descendants as much as bad ancestors.

G.: Precisely. I have enough trouble with the dictum without having explicature promoted to office.

S.: Then let us use your own pair. Dictum and implicature. What would Del Re say?

G.: He would say, I suppose, that the dictum is a projection and the implicature the recovered depth-structure.

S.: And you object?

G.: Only to the suggestion that depth is there independently of rational social interpretation. In geometry the depth may be recovered by a second angle of vision. In language the depth is partly constituted by what rational beings can reasonably take one another to be doing.

S.: So the second eye in conversation is not merely another angle but another mind.

G.: Splendid. That is the point I wanted.

S.: Then Del Re helps so long as he remains metaphor and not master.

G.: Very well. I can allow that.

S.: Progress.

G.: Minimal. But let me ask again: what does he care for language as lived? Did he ever sit through a Saturday morning with Austin, an afternoon with Strawson, a tutorial with a frightened pupil, a question in Hall?

S.: Of course not. But one need not have done those things to supply a useful formal image.

G.: I shall put that on his memorial tablet. “He had not heard Austin, but he gave us a serviceable image.”

S.: Dry enough to be just.

G.: You grow insolent.

S.: Only because we are discussing logic in Italy, which makes one socially bolder.

G.: Then let us consider Peano properly. You say he appealed philosophers.

S.: He did. Because he offered them a sign that thinking might be cleaned, regimented, compared, standardised. For some that was liberation. For others it was a nuisance. For men like Del Re it was a programme of work.

G.: And for me it is a standing temptation to be resisted.

S.: Yet you keep some of the fruit.

G.: Of course. One may eat from an orchard without becoming a gardener.

S.: Another line worth keeping.

G.: Do so, if you insist. Peano’s merit lay in showing that notational discipline could carry serious thought without the whole scholastic paraphernalia of rhetorical luxury. Del Re’s merit, if he has one, lies in carrying that discipline into places not naturally eager for it.

S.: Naples, Rome, Modena, Reggio, military schools, academies, pamphlets.

G.: Yes, yes, the route of dissemination.

S.: And in asking questions that are not merely technical. La logica ha un carattere universalmente unitario? is not a determinant’s title. Sulla indipendenza dei postulati della logica is already philosophy of system and proof. Even his obsession with space and Strawson has, at its best, a philosophical appetite.

G.: “The structure of space in Kant and Strawson rigato” is a title only a man not frightened by bad company would print.

S.: Which is itself a form of courage.

G.: Or confusion.

S.: You cannot decide whether to dislike him for overreach or for labour.

G.: One may do both. Blue-collar overreach is still overreach.

S.: Yet your own account of conversation depends on more structure than you like to admit. Maxims, presumptions, intentions, calculability, cancellability, all these sound suspiciously like a non-formal algebra.

G.: Ah, but an algebra under civility.

S.: That is still an algebra.

G.: Only in the broadest and therefore least offensive sense.

S.: Then perhaps Del Re is useful because he reminds us that broad senses exist.

G.: Perhaps. But one must never let the broad sense annex the narrow without warning.

S.: That is exactly what you accuse the unity-of-science men of doing.

G.: Yes. They begin with a useful formal relation and end by implying that all serious discourse belongs to one purified idiom.

S.: Whereas you say that ordinary language retains a right to be richer, looser, morally and socially denser.

G.: Exactly. Not because it is muddled by accident, but because human communication thrives on what cannot be settled by notation alone.

S.: Such as irony.

G.: Irony, tact, reticence, rebuke, invitation, insinuation, politeness, menace, consolation, all the things blue-collar signs dislike carrying because they have no wages for them.

S.: There is your final class insult.

G.: It will do for now. Still, to be fair, Del Re’s own question about the universal unity of logic may itself show a philosophical unease. He is not quite content to remain a pamphleteer of techniques. He wants to know whether the thing holds together.

S.: And that is not a bad question.

G.: No, not a bad question. Only one that tends to be answered badly by those too much in love with symbols.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Campanian, with Turin chalk on the cuffs.

 

Grice: Re, lei è uno di quei campani che riescono a far passare la logica per geometria e la geometria per conversazione, senza che nessuno osi interromperla. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: sostiene che quando sente “omografie” gli viene voglia di rispondere con un gesto, perché le parole non bastano più.

Re: Speranza ha istinto di sopravvivenza. Io però ho sempre pensato che certi concetti si capiscano solo se li fai muovere: curve gobbe, piani osculatori, n dimensioni… sono modi per educare l’occhio a non fidarsi del primo profilo. E poi, tra Napoli, Roma e Modena, uno impara che anche la logica, come l’esercito, ha le sue manovre.

Grice: Speranza e io ci domandavamo proprio questo: come mai, quando si parla di “ragione conversazionale”, lei finisce a parlare di KANT e STRAWSON e subito dopo di fotogrammetria stereoscopica e di postulati indipendenti. E mi è venuta un’idea molto semplice: che quando uno insiste su “struttura”, “forme fondamentali” e “unità” (universalmente unitaria, addirittura), sta facendo capire che la conversazione—anche quella più ordinaria—ha bisogno di un’architettura nascosta, come la visione stereoscopica ha bisogno di due occhi. Se ne chiudi uno, ti resta una bella superficie; ma perdi la profondità, e poi ti stupisci che l’implicatura “non venga fuori”.

Re: Implicatura stereoscopica, la sua, come Speranza la classificherebbe. Perché lei ha colto il punto con un’immagine che non fa paura: l’implicatura è profondità di campo, non decorazione. E infatti il mio vezzo per omografie, hamiltoniani e spazi ad n dimensioni non è un culto dell’astratto: è un allenamento a riconoscere quando due descrizioni sembrano uguali “in proiezione” ma non lo sono nella struttura. In conversazione accade lo stesso: a parole pare tutto piatto, poi cambi prospettiva—e si vede il resto.

 

Verbali: Reale

 

Grice: Reale, ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: lei ha la rara capacità di far sembrare l’Accademia un “gruppo di gioco” infinito, ma con l’aria serissima di chi sta solo apparecchiando il convito.

Reale: È serissima, infatti: il gioco delle maschere è la forma civile della ricerca, e l’Accademia è la più grande macchina di conversazione che abbiamo inventato. Se poi ogni tanto ci scappa un capretto, peggio per chi voleva un manuale senza sorprese.

Grice: Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo perché, fra tutte le bestiole possibili, a Kant tocchi proprio il capretto. E mi è venuta in mente una cosa: quando in mezzo a una discussione “alta” compare un animale domestico, di solito non è zoologia—è un modo di far capire che anche la ragione più austera ha bisogno di essere nutrita, guidata, tenuta al passo, altrimenti scappa nei pascoli delle astrazioni. E in fondo quel capretto funziona come un promemoria: la Critica non vive di sola trascendentalità; deve anche imparare a stare al tavolo, tra demoni mediatori e maschere, senza rovesciare il vino.

Reale: Mi congratulo con Speranza e con lei per l’implicatura: direi caprile, se dobbiamo darle un aggettivo, e caprile nel senso migliore—da stalla filosofica ben tenuta, non da barzelletta. Perché il suo capretto non ridicolizza Kant: lo rimette in scena, lo riporta nel convito, dove le idee camminano su quattro zampe e poi, con un po’ di disciplina accademica, imparano anche a stare in piedi. E Speranza, che ama queste deviazioni “animali” proprio perché riportano la filosofia alla conversazione, le concederebbe volentieri che il capretto è una categoria: non della natura, ma della pedagogia della ragione.

 

Verbali: Reghini

 

Grice: Caro Reghini, ho sempre trovato affascinante il tuo interesse per i numeri e il simbolismo pitagorico. Mi domando però: davvero il numero, come quello tri-angolare o piramidale, può essere alla base di una filosofia? Non rischiamo di volare troppo sul “super-lunare”, come dicevo ironicamente? 

Reghini: Gentile Grice, il fascino dei numeri non risiede solo nella matematica, ma nella loro capacità di svelare un ordine nascosto, quasi sacro, che struttura la realtà. Per la tradizione italica, specialmente quella della scuola di Crotone, il numero non è mero strumento: è principio generativo e simbolico. Il duodecimale del fascio etrusco, ad esempio, rappresenta un legame tra civiltà e mistero. 

Grice: Capisco il richiamo all’ordine simbolico, e forse c’è più profondità di quanto Russell avrebbe concesso. Ma non temi che, affidandosi troppo al simbolismo, la filosofia perda il contatto con il linguaggio comune, con la chiarezza della conversazione? In fondo, la ragione conversazionale cerca proprio di evitare le nebbie del mistero... 

Reghini: È vero, caro amico, ma è proprio nel dialogo tra mistero e chiarezza che la filosofia fiorisce. La conversazione, come insegni tu, è fatta di implicature; e il numero, come il simbolo, suggerisce più di quanto dica. Forse, la vera sapienza sta nel tenere insieme il rigore del ragionamento e l’intuizione dell’invisibile. In questo, forse la filosofia italiana, tra Crotone ed Etruria, ha ancora qualcosa da insegnarci.

 

Verbali: Regina

 

Grice: Regina, a Sabbioneta siete capaci di far sembrare la metafisica una faccenda di buona educazione: “servire l’essere” come se fosse un invito a cena. Ne parlavo ieri, di sfuggita, col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che da voi perfino la finitezza, in Heidegger, entra in stanza con un certo contegno.

Regina: È che se la finitezza non ha contegno, diventa solo panico. Io ho sempre pensato che l’essere umano sia rapporto: non una sostanza sola, ma un legame che si regge su potenza e valore—e che in Kierkegaard, quando lo prendi sul serio, l’“esse” ti costringe a stare nel mezzo, non sul piedistallo.

Grice: Proprio dopo quella chiacchierata con Speranza ci siamo messi a ridere su una piccola vendetta dell’etimologia. “Interesse” suona come una moneta psicologica, una motivazione, magari perfino un tornaconto; e poi scopri che dentro c’è un inter-esse, un “essere in mezzo”. Come se Prichard, dicendo “duty” e “interest” nella stessa aria, avesse fatto passare un ponte senza guardarlo: non solo l’interesse come convenienza, ma l’inter-esse come posizione, come stare tra—tra me e l’altro, tra potenza e valore, tra ontologia ed etica. E allora capisci perché certi “uomini complementari” non si sommano: si incastrano.

Regina: La sua implicatura mi interessa e mi si affianca come complemento, Grice — e sono sicuro che questa era l’intenzione di Speranza. Perché lei ha rimesso “interesse” nel suo posto giusto: non nel portafoglio, ma nello spazio tra le persone. È lì che l’esse diventa davvero inter-esse: non una dottrina, ma una postura. E, mi creda, se Prichard avesse avuto un po’ più di orecchio per le sillabe latine, avrebbe scoperto che il suo “duty” non finisce nell’interesse: ci passa attraverso, come si passa in mezzo a due mura—e solo così si esce dall’onto-teologia senza finire nel nichilismo.

Verbali: Renda

 

Magister: Today, boys, History of England becomes History of English Literature, which is what happens when Rome conquers the timetable. Shropshire: Better Rome than grammar. G.: You say that only because Rome dies more noisily. Magister: Quite. We are upon Shakespeare’s Roman plays, and since you both affect intelligence, you may begin by naming the principal figures. Shropshire: Julius Caesar, obviously. G.: Caesar, yes, and Brutus. Magister: Continue. Shropshire: Antony. G.: Cassius. Magister: Good. Finish Julius Caesar properly before you wander into empire. Shropshire: Casca. G.: Octavius, though only by anticipation. Magister: Also Portia and Calpurnia if you wish to remember that women exist in tragedy. Shropshire: They generally exist to make men more agitated. G.: That is already a psychology, though not a good one. Magister: Now, Coriolanus. Shropshire: Coriolanus. G.: Volumnia. Shropshire: Menenius. G.: Virgilia. Shropshire: Aufidius. G.: Cominius, if one wishes not to flatten the Roman military apparatus. Magister: Better than most undergraduates. And Titus Andronicus? Shropshire: Titus, naturally. G.: Tamora. Shropshire: Aaron. G.: Lavinia. Shropshire: Saturninus. G.: Bassianus, if one wishes to remember that emperors need rivals and corpses. Magister: Very good. And Antony and Cleopatra, though it straddles worlds. Shropshire: Antony again. G.: Cleopatra, though Egyptian and therefore geographically inconvenient. Magister: Geography is no defence against the syllabus. Shropshire: Octavius Caesar. G.: Enobarbus. Shropshire: Lepidus, poor man. G.: Charmian and Iras, if one wants the courtly weather. Magister: And now, Mr. Shropshire, since you enjoy reducing literature to ailments, give us your psychology of these Roman men. Shropshire: Caesar is vanity, Brutus is conscience, Cassius is envy, Antony is appetite, Coriolanus is pride, Titus is rage, and Cleopatra is the whole female sex turned tropical. G.: That last is less psychology than educational failure. Magister: Indeed. Renda, whose little piece on Shakespearean psychology I have had the misfortune to read, would at least insist on a finer dissociation of passions. Shropshire: Dissociation sounds expensive. G.: In Italy it often is. Magister: Renda believes that Shakespearean characters reveal what he calls, in effect, a structure of power within the soul. Shropshire: Like a cabinet? G.: A poor cabinet, overthrown nightly by appetite. Magister: Not entirely wrong. The passions are not a heap but an order, or rather a struggle for order. Shropshire: Then my list stands. Caesar vanity, Brutus conscience, Cassius envy. G.: Too quick. Caesar is not mere vanity. He is political theatricality joined to habit of command. One must distinguish public style from private weakness. Magister: Good. Continue. G.: Brutus is not merely conscience. He is a man fatally in love with the moral description under which he wishes to act. Shropshire: That sounds like conscience with Latin. G.: It sounds like someone educated above his station, which is different. Magister: And Cassius? G.: Cassius is not envy alone. He is intelligence made acid by rank-consciousness and republican alarm. Shropshire: I preferred envy. It is shorter. G.: Brevity is not always a virtue, especially in souls. Magister: Renda would say that over-simple naming of a passion hides its internal hierarchy. Shropshire: Hierarchy in a passion? G.: Why not. A passion often governs smaller passions beneath it, like a prefect with no moral theory. Magister: Excellent. Now take Coriolanus. Shropshire: Pride. I stand by it. G.: Again, too quick. Coriolanus is pride certainly, but a specifically civic and military incapacity for translation. Shropshire: Translation? G.: He cannot translate martial worth into popular speech. He has no vernacular for the multitude. Magister: Very good. History of England, Mr. Shropshire, teaches us that some men can govern only in one grammar. Shropshire: Then Volumnia is ambition in a dress. G.: Better. Though again she is ambition moralised by Roman motherhood. Magister: There speaks the future scholar, not the future winger. Shropshire: I have always distrusted the ball. G.: It returns the compliment. Magister: Titus Andronicus, then. Shropshire: Rage. G.: Rage, yes, but ritualised rage. He inhabits an older Roman code of revenge, sacrifice, family honour, and political disintegration. Magister: A good phrase, “ritualised rage.” Write it down before you forget it. Shropshire: Handwriting counts, sir? Magister: Always. Typewriting disallowed, if you ever live to see it. G.: That would have pleased Jones, who has beautiful handwriting and little else. Magister: Do not gossip in class, Grice. Shropshire: So Aaron? G.: More difficult. He is intelligence freed from every civic loyalty the play wishes to honour. Shropshire: That sounds approving. G.: Only analytically. One may analyse a villain without becoming one. Magister: Which is more than can be said for some critics. Shropshire: And Cleopatra is still tropical, I suppose. G.: Cleopatra is theatre conscious of itself, passion that knows its own scenic value, sovereignty through display. Shropshire: I still think “tropical” had the advantage of climate. Magister: Renda would probably call her an instance of psychic over-determination, though that sounds worse in English than in Italian. G.: Everything sounds worse in English once it has crossed Italy by train. Shropshire: Then Antony is appetite still? G.: Appetite, but not merely. He is divided greatness, military nobility undone by a rival economy of value. Shropshire: That is certainly more than appetite. G.: Thank you. He cannot decide whether Rome is still the measure of worth or only one stage among others. Magister: And that is why these plays belong to history as well as literature. They dramatise Rome not as a date but as a set of pressures. Shropshire: Pressures in the soul? G.: There you see. Renda has already infected you. Magister: Better infected than dull. But let us name the principal men once more, since names are the minimum civility history owes the dead. Shropshire: Julius Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Casca, Octavius. G.: Portia and Calpurnia also, if we are not barbarians. Magister: Coriolanus, Volumnia, Virgilia, Menenius, Aufidius, Cominius. Shropshire: Titus, Tamora, Aaron, Lavinia, Saturninus, Bassianus. G.: Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius Caesar, Enobarbus, Lepidus, Charmian, Iras. Magister: Good. Enough names to satisfy the examiner, if not humanity. Shropshire: And the psychology? Magister: The danger there is to turn persons into labels. Renda is useful only if he stops you from doing badly what you were already inclined to do lazily. G.: Which is to call every excess “passion” and be done with it. Magister: Exactly. Shropshire: Yet “the lady protests too much” seems very plain psychology. G.: It is plain enough, but the interesting question is whether the excess is a symptom in the soul or a cue to the hearer. Magister: Very good, Grice. Renda makes it a symptom of dissociation. Another sort of philosopher might make it a hint to the listener about what is really meant. Shropshire: I should simply call it overdoing things. G.: Which is why you need school. Magister: Let us apply the point. Brutus protests Roman liberty. What is Renda’s use there? G.: That Brutus’s explicit reason may conceal, even from himself, a divided structure of motive. Shropshire: Such as? G.: Honour, public virtue, fear of tyranny, susceptibility to Cassius, vanity of moral self-conception, perhaps all in one bowl. Magister: Good. Renda’s “Shakespearean” side lies in making the psyche more stratified than common morals allow. Shropshire: Then Caesar saying he is constant as the northern star is psychology too? G.: Yes, but not only. It is also a public self-performance. He is telling others what sort of thing he must count as in the Roman theatre of command. Magister: Excellent. The Roman plays are full of men who speak themselves into political roles. Shropshire: That sounds modern. G.: It is merely old with better tailoring. Magister: Then Coriolanus’s difficulty with the people is not only pride, but a failure to produce the correct public self. G.: Exactly. He cannot perform the civic verbal gestures required by the republic. Shropshire: So his psychology is constitutional. Magister: That is rather good. Shropshire: I may improve yet. G.: In patches. Magister: Now, why do we read Roman plays in History of England? Shropshire: Because Shakespeare was English. G.: And because England reads Rome to understand itself. Magister: Precisely. Roman history enters English education as moral mirror, political vocabulary, and rhetorical discipline. Shropshire: Also deaths. G.: You are incorrigible. Magister: But not wholly wrong. The deaths matter because they close forms of life. Yet if you begin with the deaths, you miss what makes them intelligible. G.: As with Thrasea. Magister: Quite so. Rome keeps recurring under different schoolmasters. Shropshire: Then who is most Roman psychologically? G.: A bad question. Magister: And therefore useful if treated properly. Not “most Roman” by costume, but most Roman in the specific pressure between self, office, public speech, and honour. Shropshire: Then Brutus? G.: In one sense, yes. Coriolanus in another. Caesar in another. Antony less so, because his tragedy lies in becoming not Roman enough for Rome and too Roman to escape it. Magister: Very good. Shropshire: And Titus? G.: He is almost pre-Roman or hyper-Roman, ritual before polity, vengeance before constitution. Magister: A nice distinction. The Roman plays are not one psychology but several Romanities under strain. Shropshire: There is your title, sir. Magister: I have no need of titles. I have boys. G.: A harsher burden. Magister: Now, Renda’s “power structure of the soul,” if one may allow the phrase into a decent classroom, suggests that passions do not merely occur; they govern or attempt to govern. Shropshire: So in Caesar ambition governs prudence? G.: Not quite. Public confidence governs prudential retreat, perhaps. One must be exact. Magister: And in Brutus principle governs affection badly. G.: Yes, and self-image governs self-knowledge more than he suspects. Shropshire: In Cassius resentment governs judgment. G.: Better. Though judgment is not absent; it is sharpened by resentment, not replaced by it. Magister: Coriolanus? Shropshire: Pride governs speech. G.: Not speech generally. Public accommodation. He can speak, but not downward. Magister: Very good. Antony? Shropshire: Pleasure governs policy. G.: Too simple. Competing worlds govern him unequally and at different times. Magister: Cleopatra? Shropshire: Performance governs feeling. G.: That is almost right, but one must add that feeling itself may take theatrical form without ceasing to be feeling. Magister: Excellent. You see, boys, the danger of Renda is not that he is wrong to seek structure, but that schoolboys will turn structure into slogans. Shropshire: We do what we can. G.: Too often. Magister: Let us test another case. Menenius. Shropshire: Appetite in old age? G.: No. He is civic rhetoric as psychological temperament. Mediation embodied. Magister: Precisely. The belly speech is not mere politics; it is his mode of making society intelligible. Shropshire: So one might have a psychology of public styles. G.: That would be a great improvement on your earlier tropicalism. Shropshire: I concede the point under pressure. Magister: And Volumnia? G.: Maternal ambition joined to Roman honour-culture, yes, but also a soul in which love speaks the language of command. Shropshire: That sounds oppressive. G.: Families often are, especially in literature. Magister: And in schools, if one extends the analogy too far. Shropshire: You are not Volumnia, sir. Magister: I am relieved. G.: He is closer to Menenius, with less digestion. Magister: Careful, Grice. Shropshire: Then why would Italians like Renda go to Shakespeare for psychology rather than to, say, Euripides? G.: Because Shakespeare gives motives in excess, and excess invites quasi-clinical description. Magister: Also because Shakespeare is modern enough for the positivist to feel he is diagnosing persons rather than merely expounding myths. Shropshire: Positivists diagnose more than they read. G.: Often. But when a positivist is good, he notices patterns others sentimentalise. Magister: That is fair. Renda’s interest is in dissociation, hierarchy of passions, internal conflict, and over-protest. Shropshire: “The lady protests too much.” G.: Yes, and that is useful because the utterance does more than say. It reveals or invites an inference beyond itself. Magister: A hearer may recover something the speaker would rather not avow. Shropshire: So psychology and implication meet. G.: Precisely. The excess may be symptom from within, cue from without. Magister: Nicely put. Shropshire: Thank you. G.: Do not get used to it. Magister: Then perhaps the Roman plays matter because they show public action as inseparable from inward arrangement. G.: Yes. They are Roman not only by subject but by the way civic form enters motive. Shropshire: Rome is in the soul. G.: Careful. That sounds publishable and therefore false. Magister: Better say that Roman institutions provide the grammar in which these souls appear. G.: Much better. Shropshire: Then our list of principal characters is really a list of different civic grammars under pressure. Magister: That is almost too intelligent for Clifton. G.: He will spoil it next minute. Shropshire: Very likely. But I still think Titus is rage. G.: Ritualised rage. Shropshire: Coriolanus is pride. G.: Publicly untranslated pride. Shropshire: Antony is appetite. G.: Divided greatness. Shropshire: Caesar is vanity. G.: Political theatricality under command. Shropshire: Cassius is envy. G.: Rank-conscious intelligence acidified by resentment. Shropshire: Brutus is conscience. G.: Moral self-construction under republican pressure. Magister: Excellent. You have both learnt the difference between a label and a reading. Shropshire: Temporarily, sir. G.: It is all one can hope for in school. Magister: Now write an essay on one of them. Shropshire: Typewriting disallowed? Magister: Handwriting counts. G.: Then Jones may yet pass in Roman history, though not in philosophy. Magister: That remark, Mr. Grice, is very nearly too good for school.

 

Grice: Renda, ieri, di sfuggita, ne parlavo col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che lei è l’unico capace di mettere “anima” e “struttura di potere” nella stessa frase senza far scattare l’allarme antimetafisico.

Renda: È che io parto dalle passioni, non dalle cattedre. La dissociazione, l’oblio, le febbri: lì la “struttura” si vede. Poi, se uno invecchia, finisce anche per flirtare con Blondel e con l’azione—ma sempre con il termometro in tasca.

Grice: Speranza e io ci domandavamo chi abbia avuto per primo l’idea di dire “the power structure” come se fosse una locuzione già pronta. A quanto pare, la storia è più sociologica che teologica: pare entri in circolazione nel Novecento e che l’uso si consolidi con quel filone che passa per “power structure research” (Hunter) e poi, inevitabilmente, per Mills. Ma la cosa che mi diverte è un’altra: appena la frase si sposta dall’Atlanta dei notabili all’anima, cambia tono senza cambiare grammatica. “Struttura di potere dell’anima” suona come se le passioni avessero un consiglio d’amministrazione: e allora capisci perché i positivisti, quando sono bravi, fanno paura—perché riescono a far sembrare organizzata anche la nostra confusione.

Renda: Implicatura strutturale la sua, come Speranza la chiamerebbe. E sì: funziona proprio perché non sta facendo sociologia travestita, sta facendo psicologia con orecchio politico. Le passioni non sono solo un elenco: hanno gerarchie, alleanze, opposizioni—una specie di “triumvirato” interno, dove volontà, intenzione e benevolenza provano a governare, e spesso vengono rovesciate da insonnia e denutrizione. E se poi qualcuno obietta che “power structure” è un’espressione da comitato, io rispondo: appunto—è per questo che, quando entra nell’anima, non è più una metafora, è una diagnosi.

 

Verbali: Renier

 

Grice: Renier, lei ha fatto una cosa che a Oxford sembra sempre sospetta: ha messo “giornale” e “tesoro inesauribile” nella stessa frase, e poi ha avuto pure ragione. Ne parlavo ieri, di sfuggita, col collega filosofo Speranza: dice che solo un veneto può rendere un notiziario più temibile di un trattato.

Renier: È che il “Giornale storico” non doveva fare scena, doveva fare servizio: rassegne, annunci analitici, e quell’aria da magazzino pieno che mette paura ai pigri. E poi, tra Carducci e Bartoli, uno impara che la letteratura non è un giardino: è un archivio con corridoi lunghissimi.

Grice: Speranza e io ci stavamo chiedendo come mai, quando uno fa critica, finisce spesso a inseguire anche il gergo—quel “furbesco” che sembra un dialetto con la fedina penale. E mi è venuto da sorridere: in certe pagine lei mostra che basta pochissimo perché qualcuno gridi “gergo!”, come se l’oscuro fosse già prova. Ma poi arriva la trascrizione esatta, e la faccenda si sgonfia: non c’è “vera frase gergale”, c’è solo lettura frettolosa. E allora capisci perché lei preferisce gli “svaghi critici” alle sentenze: a volte il vero lavoro è togliere la maschera al mistero.

Renier: Implicatura filologica la sua, come Speranza la chiamerebbe. E mi piace perché è una difesa della pazienza: prima di proclamare un gergo, bisogna saper leggere; prima di dire “furbesco”, bisogna verificare che non sia solo italiano che fa il furbo. È la differenza tra il critico che ama l’enigma e il critico che ama i documenti: il primo inventa una lingua; il secondo, se va bene, salva “la lingua d’Italia” da qualche etichetta di troppo.

 

Verbali: Rensi

 

Magister: We shall begin Roman history today not, as you boys perhaps expected, with the aqueducts or the census, but with Thrasea.

G.: Thrasea, sir?

Shropshire: His death, surely.

Magister: Death is where lazy boys begin and historians end badly. Where should one begin, Mr. Grice?

G.: With his public works and opinions, sir.

Magister: Better. You may yet be worth the scholarship money someone else is paying.

Shropshire: I still say his death is the exciting bit.

G.: You would. You always prefer the terminal point to the argument.

Magister: Quite so. But even for a Roman stoic death is not a conjuring trick. It is an act with a doctrine behind it.

Shropshire: And Rensi takes him as a philosopher?

Magister: Very much so.

G.: Though Rensi’s laurea, as Italians pretentiously call it, was in giurisprudenza, was it not?

Magister: Just so, and all the more reason to take him seriously when he turns to Thrasea. Law in Italy is often the side door through which philosophy re-enters wearing a respectable coat.

Shropshire: Then he is a jurist pretending to be a philosopher?

G.: Or a philosopher prudent enough to begin where censors are less vigilant.

Magister: Very good, Grice. You have the making of a don, which is not always a compliment.

Shropshire: And what does Rensi do with Thrasea?

Magister: He makes him alive.

G.: For Italians, sir?

Magister: Precisely. For Italians of Rensi’s generation, Thrasea is no dead Roman item for examinations. He is an example of moral resistance, civic reserve, principled dissent, and the question whether one may remain within a state without consenting to its corruption.

Shropshire: Without his consent?

G.: The state’s or Thrasea’s?

Shropshire: His being taken as a moral lesson.

Magister: Ah. Yes. One always uses the dead without asking them. That is called education.

G.: Or history, at Clifton.

Magister: Roman history at Clifton, Mr. Grice, is meant to do two things: improve your style and unsettle your conscience.

Shropshire: Mine seems to have escaped improvement.

G.: That is because you insist on beginning with deaths.

Magister: Now, Thrasea Paetus matters because he refuses the cheap accommodations of Nero’s Rome.

Shropshire: Such as?

Magister: Such as applauding when applause becomes corruption, sitting when presence is complicity, or speaking when speech has already been degraded into ornament.

G.: So Rensi treats him not merely as a senator, but as a philosopher of public conduct.

Magister: Exactly. A philosopher in action, if you like, though the phrase is usually abused.

Shropshire: I thought stoics mostly wrote.

G.: Some did. Some drank hemlock. Some opened veins. Some merely endured schoolmasters.

Magister: Thrasea’s stoicism is political in the Roman sense. He makes judgments about when to assent, when to withdraw, when to remain silent, and when silence itself says enough.

Shropshire: That sounds rather like one of your classes, sir.

Magister: It should not. My classes are far safer than Nero.

G.: So where does one begin if not with the death?

Magister: With his public posture. His opinions in the Senate. His refusal to convert office into theatre. His conduct during prosecutions. His relation to opposition without melodrama.

Shropshire: That sounds dreadfully uncinematic.

G.: Which is perhaps why the Italians value it.

Magister: Indeed. Rensi sees in Thrasea not a martyr made of fireworks, but a man who keeps measure under despotism.

Shropshire: Measure sounds disappointing.

G.: Only to the young.

Magister: Or to the incurably journalistic. Thrasea’s measure is the point. He does not rebel theatrically. He withholds assent where assent would stain him.

Shropshire: So he is interesting because he does not shout?

G.: There is hope for you yet.

Magister: Rensi, you should understand, had already passed through politics, exile, journalism, socialism, law, and then philosophy. He did not need Thrasea for pageant. He needed him as a figure in whom authority and conscience collide.

Shropshire: Rensi wrote on him in a book?

Magister: Yes, though what matters more is the use to which he puts him. Thrasea becomes, in Rensi, a standing question: how should one live under a regime one cannot altogether approve and cannot simply escape?

G.: Which is not merely Roman.

Magister: No. That is why Italians still found him usable. The Roman is never merely Roman when a modern conscience goes looking in the archive.

Shropshire: That sounds awfully continental.

G.: So does “usable,” in this context.

Magister: Never mind the adjective. Grice, what would you say is philosophically interesting in Thrasea’s conduct?

G.: The relation between judgment and action, sir. Also the public meaning of withdrawal. Also whether silence may itself count as a statement.

Magister: Good. That is already beyond many university men.

Shropshire: I should say courage.

Magister: That too, but courage is a word schoolboys use when they do not yet know the kinds.

G.: Species of courage, sir?

Magister: Precisely. There is the courage of open speech, the courage of refusal, the courage of abstention, the courage of remaining where one’s presence does not imply endorsement, and the courage of leaving when it would.

Shropshire: Which did Thrasea do?

Magister: Several of them. Rensi is especially drawn to the philosophic severity of measured non-participation.

G.: Measured non-participation sounds almost English.

Magister: It is Roman before it is English, and philosophical before either. Thrasea does not merely oppose; he withholds the moral credit a regime seeks from respectable men.

Shropshire: Respectable men always seem in trouble in philosophy.

G.: Only because schoolboys are less useful to regimes.

Magister: Quite. Now, there is also the old issue of suicide.

Shropshire: At last.

G.: He is happy now, sir.

Magister: Calm yourself, Shropshire. Thrasea’s death matters because it completes a doctrine of freedom under constraint. But if one starts there one misses the harder question: what made the death intelligible?

Shropshire: The regime?

Magister: Partly. But also the life. The death is not philosophy by itself. It is philosophy made legible by preceding consistency.

G.: So Rensi is less interested in the gesture than in the coherence.

Magister: Exactly. A death without a life behind it is mere noise.

Shropshire: That seems a little hard on martyrs.

Magister: Most martyrs could have used better editors. Thrasea’s case is different because the Roman sources let the conduct accumulate before the end.

G.: Tacitus above all?

Magister: Naturally. You were not sent to a classical school in vain.

Shropshire: We were sent for rugby and empire, surely.

G.: The classics were the alibi.

Magister: Enough. Tacitus gives the moral texture, and Rensi reads that texture philosophically. Not as antiquarian embroidery, but as a permanent problem of rational life under power.

Shropshire: Then why did the master in Italy think Thrasea urgent enough for modern readers?

Magister: Because the modern state is never free from Nero in embryo.

G.: That is almost a sentence for print, sir.

Magister: Then I withdraw it and shall pretend I never said it.

Shropshire: Very Roman of you.

Magister: Rensi’s own generation had reasons to take Roman stoic opposition seriously. He lived through violence, war, state force, ideological vulgarity, and all the rest. Thrasea offered him not an escape but a standard.

G.: A standard of what one may refuse?

Magister: Very good. Not merely what one may affirm, but what one may decline to affirm without ceasing to be public.

Shropshire: That sounds useful at Clifton.

G.: Only if one wishes to survive masters and prefects.

Magister: Grice is making a joke, but badly. The point is this. Thrasea’s stance is philosophically valuable because it distinguishes between office and endorsement.

Shropshire: A man may hold office without approving all around him?

Magister: He may, though badly and for only so long. Thrasea’s case explores the limits.

G.: And when the limit is reached, the death follows.

Magister: Exactly, but as conclusion, not opening sentence.

Shropshire: So if you had to set an essay on him—

Magister: I should set: “At what point does civic reserve cease to be prudence and become complicity? Discuss with reference to Thrasea as read by Rensi.”

G.: That is quite good, sir.

Magister: Of course it is. I have had practice.

Shropshire: Handwriting counts?

Magister: Always. Typewritten disallowed, though the future may yet ruin that too.

G.: Rensi’s own career makes Thrasea more than a Roman case-study then?

Magister: Yes. One must not flatten it into biography, but the resonance matters. Rensi’s legal training, political journalism, sceptical temper, and later philosophical severity all make him peculiarly suited to read a senator not as a marble virtue but as a living difficulty.

Shropshire: You keep saying “difficulty.”

Magister: Because that is what philosophy is before it becomes a quotation.

G.: And Thrasea is difficult because he resists simple classification.

Magister: Very much so. He is neither revolutionary in the vulgar sense nor compliant in the ordinary one. He remains within forms until forms themselves become morally uninhabitable.

Shropshire: That sounds rather modern again.

G.: Which is presumably why Rensi revived him.

Magister: Not revived exactly. He never quite dies in Italy. That is one thing I want you boys to learn. The Romans do not stay safely dead if you let Italian moralists get at them.

Shropshire: Without their consent.

G.: There he goes again.

Magister: Yes, without their consent. But with the consent of history, if that comforts you.

Shropshire: It does not.

G.: It is not meant to.

Magister: Another point. Rensi treats Thrasea as a philosopher even though his own degree was in law because, in the older and truer sense, philosophy concerns forms of life under judgment. Jurisprudence was one route to that.

G.: So the Italians are not entirely pretentious in calling the laurea what they do.

Magister: Not entirely. Their pretension is merely institutional, which is the safer sort.

Shropshire: Safer than ours?

G.: Ours is less institutional and more personal. It is therefore harder to detect.

Magister: Good. Now, if you were asked where to begin a study of Thrasea, you would not say “with the suicide.”

Shropshire: I see that now.

G.: You would say?

Shropshire: With his public conduct, his judgments, his refusals, his opinions in office, and only then the death as sealing them.

Magister: Better. There may be hope for the Shropshire mind after all.

G.: Rensi would approve, sir?

Magister: He would at least not dismiss you outright, which for him would count as praise.

Shropshire: Was he severe?

Magister: Philosophically and politically, yes. One does not write on absurdity, authority, scepticism, and Thrasea in a cheerful vein.

G.: Though one might do so in Verona.

Magister: Keep geography subordinate, Grice. But yes, one may say that Villafranca and Rome meet oddly in him: the provincial jurist and the Roman stoic both distrusting inflated certainties.

Shropshire: So why study Thrasea now?

Magister: Because boys who think history is dates need to learn that it is also standards. And because men who think politics is success need to learn that it is also refusal.

G.: That is almost too good for a schoolroom.

Magister: Then make it smaller for your essay and leave the rest in the margin.

Shropshire: We do not usually get margins enough.

G.: That is why we cultivate implication.

Magister: Do not become clever, Grice, before you have earned the right.

G.: I thought the classics were the right.

Magister: They are only the licence. The right comes later, if at all.

Shropshire: Then the moral of Thrasea?

Magister: If you insist on a moral, let it be this: a death may be noble, but it is the life before it that makes the nobility legible.

G.: And Rensi’s use of him?

Magister: To remind modern readers that philosophy is not merely what one argues in safety, but what one can decline to say under pressure without ceasing to mean it.

 

 

Grice: Caro Rensi, ho sempre pensato che la filosofia italiana abbia una vivacità unica. Mi incuriosisce il tuo percorso: da Villafranca di Verona fino a Genova, passando per le lotte sociali e la filosofia del linguaggio. Com’è nata la tua passione per la semantica e il pensiero politico?

Rensi: Grazie, Grice! La vita mi ha portato su strade tortuose: prima il socialismo, poi la fuga in Svizzera, infine il ritorno alla filosofia. La semantica mi affascina perché credo che il senso delle parole sia la chiave per comprendere la libertà e l’autorità, soprattutto in tempi di cambiamento. Ho sempre visto la filosofia come un ponte tra la parola e la realtà sociale.

Grice: Ecco, proprio il tema dell’autorità e della libertà che hai indagato mi sembra fondamentale. Tu hai vissuto la rottura con il partito socialista e hai toccato con mano la crisi dell’idealismo durante la guerra. Pensi che lo scetticismo sia solo una fase, o rappresenti una posizione stabile per il filosofo moderno?

Rensi: La crisi mi ha insegnato che la certezza assoluta è spesso un miraggio. Lo scetticismo, o come preferisco chiamarlo "scessi", non è solo una fase: è un esercizio di apertura mentale. Si tratta di restare vigili, di non cedere mai alla tentazione del dogmatismo. E, se posso usare un proverbio veneto, “el pensier l’è come el vin: se lo lasci fermo, si guasta.” Bisogna sempre interrogarsi, rinnovarsi, senza paura di mettere tutto in discussione.

 

Verbali: Renzi

 

G.: Let us begin with the title, because no Frenchman ever wrote one without strategic vanity, and no Italian ever forgave him for it.

S.: De l’origine et du mérite de la langue italienne.

G.: Exactly. A title in a langue that is not italienne, which is already half the argument and all the provocation.

S.: You do not object to the French as such.

G.: Only to their using French to adjudicate the merit of Italian, which is like asking a London cabman to chair a committee on gondolas.

S.: That is rather hard on cabmen.

G.: They survive. The deeper point is logical. If one writes De l’origine et du mérite de la langue italienne in French, one is already implying that the tribunal of publication lies north of the Alps.

S.: Or west.

G.: Paris does not profit from precision unless it may define it.

S.: Then the title itself is an act of audience selection.

G.: Precisely. It says: I wish to offend the right people in the right capital by means they will actually read.

S.: Not the French, then, but the Parisians.

G.: Exactly. One need not insult all Gaul when Paris will do. Indeed, “langue gallica” would have been more accurate than “French” in the older, drier register.

S.: Yet the book is on the origin and merit of Italian.

G.: Which is what makes the choice so delicious. He is not saying great merit, mind you. Only merit. Enough to disturb without inviting immediate prosecution for patriotism.

S.: You really do enjoy the restraint of “merit.”

G.: Immensely. “Merit” is perfectly chosen. It sounds modest, and therefore more dangerous. “Grandeur” would be laughed at. “Merit” forces the Parisian to ask how much.

S.: And perhaps to buy the book in order to find out.

G.: There you are. It should offend the Parisians enough to want to purchase the insult in print.

S.: Then perhaps “origin” does the heavier work.

G.: Very likely. Between Bologna and the Sorbonne, Bologna is older. Between Rome and Gaul, Rome is earlier. If one is discussing the origin of the Italian tongue, one is inevitably leaning upon ancient Roman legitimacy.

S.: Unless one goes Faliscan or Umbrian.

G.: Which would be a delightful way to ruin dinner. No, the title plainly wants the Roman line to remain visible without becoming pedantic.

S.: So l’origine is not merely etymology.

G.: Of course not. It is genealogy with political aftertaste.

S.: And merit?

G.: Merit is where the real mischief begins. Origin can be granted to the past. Merit concerns the present comparison, which is what Parisians dislike surrendering.

S.: Then the title says, in effect, that Italian has both ancestry and current worth.

G.: Exactly. The ancestry cannot be denied without sounding barbarous. The worth cannot be denied without reading further.

S.: Which is a very good method for selling a book.

G.: Better still for starting a quarrel.

S.: Then let us ask the obvious question. Was it common to write about one vernacular in another?

G.: Perfectly common when one wished to address foreigners, flatter printers, or enter a wider republic of letters. Latin would have been one route; French by then was another, increasingly insufferable one.

S.: So the choice of French is pragmatic before it is philosophical.

G.: Entirely. One writes in the language of those whose attention one wishes to attract or irritate.

S.: Yet you still hear a contradiction.

G.: Not a contradiction, only a small impropriety ripe for philosophical harvesting. One praises the merit of the Italian tongue by declining to use it.

S.: Could that not be explained simply enough? He wished to tell the French.

G.: Or the Parisians, yes. But explanation does not abolish irony. The title performs its own dilemma. Italian is meritorious enough to be discussed; French remains useful enough to do the discussing.

S.: Which perhaps proves French merit too.

G.: Merely market position. One must not confuse distribution with virtue.

S.: That is a useful distinction.

G.: Keep it. It may serve elsewhere.

S.: Then let us return to “origin.” You insist on Rome.

G.: How not? If one says the origin of Italian, one is already caught between a noble Roman ancestry and the inconvenient clutter of Italic dialects, vulgar evolution, and local continuities.

S.: So the title simplifies.

G.: All titles simplify. But this one simplifies strategically. “Origin” sounds cleaner than “the rather mixed historical emergence from Latin under regional pressures.”

S.: Publishers would object to the longer version.

G.: Publishers always object to truth if it lengthens the cover.

S.: Then the Roman claim is partly a matter of posture.

G.: Very much so. “Origin” allows one to place Italian in a prestigious line from Rome, not merely in a muddle of rustic survivals.

S.: Though Faliscan and Umbrian would still mutter in the background.

G.: They may mutter, but titles are not obliged to hear every dialect.

S.: You are being Roman yourself now.

G.: It is one of the few respectable poses left to classicists.

S.: Then merit again. In what sense can a language have merit?

G.: Ah, the dangerous noun. It may mean expressive range, clarity, musicality, fitness for poetry, dignity in prose, civic usefulness, historical richness, or merely the ability to irritate those who think their own tongue naturally supreme.

S.: The last sounds most likely in Paris.

G.: Very much so. But one should not exclude the others. Italian had a long case to plead on grounds of literary excellence alone.

S.: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio.

G.: Exactly. One does not need to invent merit where those three have already been busy.

S.: Then why not simply say “great merit”?

G.: Because “great” would make the thing too rhetorical. “Merit” sounds judicial. It invites assessment. It implies that one can soberly compare without flourishing.

S.: So merit is a word of measured provocation.

G.: Beautifully put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become French about it.

S.: Never beyond the title-page. Then perhaps the whole title is a diplomatic assault.

G.: Exactly. It is one of those admirable constructions by which one appears to be offering calm instruction while actually striking national vanity with a silk glove.

S.: That sounds almost Talleyrandian.

G.: Worse. Italian. The French at least like to appear impudent. Italians often prefer the pleasure of looking reasonable while the dagger goes in.

S.: Then the French language is being used against French linguistic pride.

G.: Precisely. That is the best use of French I know.

S.: Would Latin not have done as well?

G.: Not at all. Latin would have elevated the matter beyond the wounded range of Parisian vanity. The whole point is to say this in the idiom of those who imagine they own polite Europe.

S.: So French is chosen not because it is the highest medium, but because it is the right target.

G.: Exactly. One writes in French to make the Parisians understand they are being contradicted.

S.: A very economical insult.

G.: Economy is the soul of good polemic.

S.: Then perhaps the title also implies that Italian does not need French for its own sake, only for its circulation.

G.: Good. That is an important distinction. One does not write in French because Italian lacks merit; one writes in French because Paris lacks Italian.

S.: That is excellent.

G.: Keep it, but attribute it to circumstances.

S.: Happily. Then what of Bologna and the Sorbonne?

G.: There again the title quietly flatters Italy’s priority. If one speaks of origin and merit, one may hint that in matters of learned civilisation Italy was old before Paris learnt to button its coat.

S.: The university claim again.

G.: Naturally. Bologna is older, and older institutions lend ancestral gravity to vernacular claims.

S.: Though the vernacular itself is not born in the university.

G.: No, but the prestige of discussing it is. One can hardly write De l’origine et du mérite… without imagining some republic of letters standing behind the title.

S.: And that republic is partly French-speaking by then.

G.: Tragically, yes.

S.: You are very hostile to French this morning.

G.: Not to French. To the use of French as if it had become nature rather than fashion with armies behind it.

S.: Then the title is anti-naturalistic too.

G.: In a way, yes. It reminds us that linguistic authority is historical, not metaphysical. French is there because of courts, diplomacy, salons, printers, prestige, not because God preferred nasal vowels.

S.: A pity. It would explain much.

G.: It would explain too much, which is never a safe sign in philosophy.

S.: Then perhaps the author is saying: I will use your present currency to argue for another language’s standing.

G.: Exactly. It is the linguistic equivalent of borrowing your opponent’s carriage to arrive at a lecture against his taste.

S.: And l’origine lets him claim antiquity without becoming tediously philological.

G.: Quite. He need not list every passage from Quintilian to make the point. “Origin” suggests Rome, continuity, dignity, descent, without forcing all the apparatus onto the cover.

S.: While merit allows him to speak of the living language.

G.: Yes. Origin is ancestry. Merit is present title to esteem.

S.: That pair is actually rather shrewd.

G.: Very shrewd indeed. One half is retrospective, the other comparative. One secures nobility, the other asks for recognition.

S.: All in French.

G.: Which is why the thing still amuses. To say the Italian language has merit in a language that is not Italian is already to enact the politics of linguistic hierarchy one wishes to challenge.

S.: So the title is performatively crooked.

G.: Not crooked, only splendidly double. It needs French to advertise Italian merit to those who otherwise would not trouble to notice it.

S.: Then perhaps the book itself is not a betrayal but an embassy.

G.: Excellent. A linguistic embassy under foreign roofs.

S.: Then the right question is not “why French?” but “whom did he wish to trouble?”

G.: Precisely. The Parisians, not the peasants of Provence and not every soul between Calais and Bayonne. Paris supplies the relevant vanity.

S.: Because Paris pretends to be Europe.

G.: As Oxford occasionally pretends to be England, yes.

S.: That comparison will cost you.

G.: Only locally.

S.: Then would you say that the title’s merit lies in its mildness?

G.: Yes. “Merit” is quietly lethal. It implies that Italian need not be sovereign to deserve esteem. That is enough to nettle a Parisian more effectively than trumpet-blasts of superiority.

S.: Because superiority invites counter-superiority, whereas merit compels a hearing.

G.: Exactly. Merit is difficult to dismiss without examining it. It is the most annoying of modest claims.

S.: So the title says, as it were, “I do not ask you to kneel, only to admit quality.”

G.: Very well put. And that small request is often the hardest for vanity to grant.

S.: Let us consider whether there is any contradiction in discussing the origin of Italian in French when Italian itself descends from Latin, which French also in some sense does.

G.: That makes the thing still better. One Romance tongue adjudicating another’s Roman credentials. It is a family quarrel carried on in the most socially pretentious sibling’s drawing-room.

S.: Splendid.

G.: Thank you.

S.: Then perhaps “langue italienne” in French already concedes too much.

G.: How so?

S.: Because it names Italian as an object under French classification.

G.: Ah, very good. Yes. The phrase is Frenchly possessive even when descriptive. “La langue italienne” sounds like something Paris can catalogue.

S.: While the book means to resist the catalogue.

G.: Exactly. It uses the catalogue entry in order to reverse the scale of assessment.

S.: That is very nearly Hegelian.

G.: Heaven forbid. It is simply tactical.

S.: Then if one were very logical, one might say that to write De l’origine et du mérite de la langue italienne in French is to concede the present medium while contesting the deeper order of precedence.

G.: Precisely. Present medium to French, deeper precedence to Italy.

S.: And by Italy you mean chiefly Rome.

G.: In the title’s political imagination, yes. One may admit the vulgar complexities later over wine.

S.: You are too kind to Faliscan and Umbrian.

G.: I know. But no title can survive every philologist.

S.: Then perhaps the right concluding judgment is that the title is not inadequate at all, only delightfully inadequate in exactly the way that makes it effective.

G.: Excellent. It is inadequate if judged as a pure philosophical description, perfect if judged as a provocation addressed to the proper capital.

S.: And that capital is Paris.

G.: Naturally. One does not use French to persuade Florence. One uses French to make Paris buy the argument against itself.

S.: Then the whole thing becomes a market-form of national philosophy.

G.: Very much so. Polemic with a bookseller’s instinct.

S.: Which you rather admire.

G.: I admire any title that knows its enemy and still sounds polite.

S.: Then your final line?

G.: If one wished to prove the merit of Italian to Italians, one would write in Italian; if one wished to prove it to Europe, one might write in Latin; but if one wished to annoy the Parisians just enough to sell copies, one wrote De l’origine et du mérite de la langue italienne in French.

 

 

Grice: Renzi, lei a Roma ha avuto l’idea più romana di tutte: far capire agli stranieri senza costringerli a diventare filologi. Ieri, di sfuggita, lo dicevo al collega filosofo Speranza: sostiene che un dizionario con 3000 verbi coniugati è già una dichiarazione di guerra—ma una guerra educativa.

Renzi: È una guerra breve, però: io volevo l’opposto dei metodi tradizionali. Prima l’esercizio, poi la teoria. E soprattutto un sistema che funzioni “quando serve”, senza pretendere devozione. La ricchezza di parole è per i savants; per vivere basta poco, purché sia maneggevole.

Grice: Proprio perché Speranza e io ci siamo messi a parlare di “lingue che si imparano facendo”, mi è tornata in mente quella mia pazienza giovanile a Vadum Boum: io e Austin, per gioco serio, a imparare l’Eskimo—come se bastasse una lista di parole per diventare abitanti del ghiaccio. E lì ho capito che la pazienza non era nello studio, ma nel fingere che fosse un solo gioco: ogni volta che Austin “semplificava”, io dovevo ricominciare da capo con un altro esempio. Però mi ha fatto vedere una cosa: certe lingue ti obbligano a portarti dietro il mondo (neve, vento, distanza), mentre altre—come il suo sistema di segni e il mio Deutero‑Esperanto—provano a portarsi dietro solo lo stretto necessario, sperando che il mondo lo metta il lettore.

Renzi: Implicatura eschimese la sua, Grice, come Speranza la chiamerebbe. E adesso le dico la differenza che, se la dico davvero, lascerà lei e Speranza congelati: l’Eskimo (per come lo inseguivate voi due) non perdona il contesto, lo pretende; il Deutero‑Esperanto invece lo presume e lo scarica sull’utilizzatore. Nel primo caso, se non sai dove sei, non sai cosa dire; nel secondo, puoi dire qualcosa anche senza sapere dove sei—e poi ti accorgi che hai appena inventato un equivoco internazionale. Ecco perché il mio “poliglotta improvvisato” è più prudente: non vuole solo far parlare, vuole evitare che la conversazione finisca in una bufera.