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

 

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

 

 

Verbali: Plantadossi

 

Grice: “St John’s. Old Kneale and his wife are running a wonderfully earnest seminar in Oxford on the growth of logic, and Potts, one of my tutees, came back looking pleased with himself.

P. Today was on the Conclusiones,” he said, as if that settled anything. “Conclusiones of what?”

I asked. “John of Ripa’s early Paris stuff, circa 1354—back when Italians were fashionable because their Latin made the Franks sound like they’d learned it from a shop sign.” “That still doesn’t tell me what he’s concluding about,” I said. Potts looked almost relieved. “That’s the best part,” he said. “The Kneales didn’t supply any conclusive evidence that they knew either.” “Oxford scholarship for you,” I told him, and set him an essay for next week: How to conclude without knowing what you’re concluding about—and how your audience manages to cooperate anyway.”

 

Grice: Plantadossi, ho letto con grande interesse delle sue riflessioni sul problema degli universali. Mi incuriosisce come lei riesca a collegare l’implicatura conversazionale alla questione metafisica: secondo lei, il linguaggio può davvero aiutarci a sciogliere i nodi dei concetti universali?

Plantadossi: Caro Grice, la conversazione filosofica è spesso il terreno privilegiato per affrontare tali problemi. L’implicatura, come lei insegna, mostra che molto di ciò che intendiamo va oltre il detto — e questo vale anche per gli universali, che si manifestano nel dialogo come idee condivise e, a volte, contestate tra interlocutori.

Grice: Mi trova d’accordo! Penso che l’implicatura sia la chiave per capire come le idee universali siano trasmesse, non solo formalmente, ma anche nel modo in cui le viviamo e le interpretiamo. Nella sua “lectura super sententiarum”, come affronta il rapporto tra immutatio vitalis e la distanza tra il divino e il creato?

Plantadossi: La mia tesi è che la beatitudine, pur essendo pienezza, non annulla mai la differenza tra Dio e creatura. L’immutatio vitalis rappresenta un mutamento interno dell’intelletto, che accoglie la presenza divina senza abolire la distanza. Così, anche nel dialogo, possiamo avvicinarci alla verità, pur rimanendo consapevoli dei nostri limiti. Il linguaggio è ponte, ma mai scorciatoia.

 

Verbali: Plebe

 

G.: Plebe has produced one of those titles that make one feel philosophy is trying on an overcoat.

S.: Which title.

G.: Il concetto hegeliano di filosofia della storia. One can hear the youth in every syllable. Not history. Not Hegel and history. But the Hegelian concept of philosophy of history.

S.: You object to the scholastic weight of it. G.: I object to its confidence. A man of twenty-one writes as if he has already decided that history requires two things before breakfast: a concept, and Hegel to provide it. S.: Under Guzzo, that is hardly surprising.

G.: Quite. Guzzo published La filosofia della storia in 1945. A relatore who has made philosophy of history sound like a living room rather than a ruin will naturally produce pupils who think it normal to install themselves there. S.: And Guzzo would not have regarded philosophy of history as antiquarian lumber. G.: No. In Turin it was alive. In Oxford it is mostly a smell from another century unless Collingwood walks in carrying it under his arm. That is the first contrast. S.: Yet you are not against it entirely. G.: I am against the phrase when it pretends to do too much. “Philosophy of history” sounds, in young hands, like the sort of discipline that ought to settle everything from Waterloo to the Kingdom of Prussia by means of a sufficiently elevated noun. S.: Which is, admittedly, very Hegelian. G.: Or very anti-Hegelian, depending on whether the youth is quoting him or correcting him. The title has the proper filial insolence. It can be read as school obedience or school rebellion. “The Hegelian concept of philosophy of history” may mean: here is the doctrine of the master. Or: here are the limits of the doctrine, respectfully demonstrated under the eyes of the master’s delegate. S.: You are turning Plebe into a subtle strategist. G.: Any thesis under a relatore is strategy with footnotes. The student is saying two things at once. I am your pupil. And: I have noticed where you are wrong. S.: Then tell me where you think the pressure lies. G.: In the genitive, or rather in the Italian avoidance of one. Il concetto hegeliano di filosofia della storia. Not della filosofia della storia. That is the nice point. He does not say “the concept of the philosophy of history,” as if “philosophy of history” were already a secured department. He says “the Hegelian concept of philosophy of history,” which allows the whole thing to remain under Hegel’s specific responsibility. S.: You like the di. G.: I like it because it is less pompous than it looks. It says: this is Hegel’s way of construing the enterprise, not an eternal faculty of the mind. S.: But you still prefer Vico. G.: If I am to be asked, in Italy, to sit through a philosophy of history, I should like it to begin with Vico before any tedesco starts unfolding Spirit across Europe. S.: Ah yes. Your anti-Hegelian patriotism by proxy. G.: Not patriotism. Propriety. If Naples has already given us Vico, why should Turin send a Piemontese boy to kneel before Hegel on this particular altar. S.: Because Turin is not Naples. G.: Exactly. Turin has its own intellectual weather, and that weather is drier, more school-like, more willing to let Hegel sound like a live academic subject rather than a rival claim to Vico’s throne. S.: So for Guzzo and Plebe, philosophy of history is a living thing. G.: Yes, and that is what Grice’s Oxford largely lacks. Oxford has history, and it has philosophy, and it occasionally allows them to shake hands, but it distrusts the compound whenever it begins to sound teleological. S.: Not entirely. There is Collingwood. G.: Collingwood is the bridge, not the city. He carries enough of idealist-historicist seriousness to remind Oxford that history is not a heap of dates. But he is not Hegel in a gown and certainly not Guzzo in Italian. S.: And Berlin later. G.: Berlin philosophises about ideas in history, not about history as a self-unfolding rational whole. The Chichele is a good place to resist monism, not to enthrone it. S.: Gardiner too. G.: Gardiner philosophises about historical explanation, which is a much more English enterprise: how historians explain, what counts as cause, how objectivity behaves. It is not Geist in search of a state. S.: So Grice’s Oxford is suspicious of philosophy of history. G.: Suspicious of the strong kind. It is willing to philosophise about history, but less willing to let history itself become the great self-interpreting process. S.: Which brings us back to Plebe. You hear in his title the pressure of school and counter-school. G.: Yes. And also the problem of lineality versus recurrence. S.: Explain. G.: Hegel’s philosophy of history wants a line. Not a straight line, to be fair, but a dialectical advance: Spirit, freedom, state, world-history, the lot. Vico gives you recurrence: corsi and ricorsi, structured returns, not simple repetition but the thought that human things come round again. S.: And you want to apply that contrast not merely to history but to the history of philosophy. G.: Naturally. Because if the history of philosophy is simply lineal, then one gets those ridiculous textbook processions: Plato to Aristotle, Kant to Hegel, Moore to Russell, Russell to all who matter, and so on. S.: You dislike processions. G.: I dislike any procession that forgets that problems return in philosophy. They do not simply get buried by successors. A problem can be solved, and then solved again, and then reappear as if no one had solved it at all. S.: So not thesis, antithesis, synthesis. G.: No. That triad is schoolroom Hegel and hardly worth dignifying. I prefer something more modest and more accurate: problem, solution, new problem. Or perhaps problem, attempted solution, rediscovered problem. S.: Which is already more Vichian than Hegelian. G.: In the sense that it allows recurrence, yes. Not mechanical circles, but the return of questions under new forms. S.: Give me an example. G.: Plato and Aristotle, if you like. One can tell a lineal story: Plato first, Aristotle revises. But one can also tell a recurrent story: problems of universals, substance, reason, politics, and explanation return under altered idioms. S.: Hence your absurd compounds. G.: Aristokant, Kantotle, Heglato. Yes. They are absurd only because textbooks are too neat. In real philosophy the old problems leak forward and the new solutions leak backward. We do not merely move from Plato to Hegel; sometimes we discover Plathegel, or Heglato if you prefer a stronger monstrosity. S.: And this is where the history of philosophy becomes unlike history simpliciter. G.: Precisely. History simpliciter gives you Waterloo, Trafalgar, Charles I losing his head, the French Revolution, the American Revolution before it, all the events Hegel likes because they let him sound like Providence with a timetable. S.: And the Prussian state waiting at the end like a rather over-dressed conclusion. G.: Quite. The Kaiser of Prussia as if he were the highest mode of being. One can see why Italians might hesitate before treating that as their own culmination. S.: Especially in postwar 1950. G.: Especially then. That is what makes Plebe’s early Hegel book interesting in context. Italy has just come out of one sort of historical grand narrative and is being asked to take another one seriously in the lecture room. S.: And because he is young, perhaps too young for the war in the full older sense, he can still treat philosophy of history as a live academic programme rather than as a wreck. G.: Exactly. He is of the generation that reaches the university just after catastrophe but not yet in its full personal burden. So his relation to history is scholarly before it is penitential. S.: Unlike Piovani. G.: Unlike Piovani, yes. Piovani has wartime journalism, fascist slogans, a moral re-entry to perform. Plebe has Turin, Guzzo, Hegel, and the problem of whether philosophy of history is still respectable after the collapse of so many public absolutes. S.: Then perhaps the title is not pompous but brave. G.: I would not go that far. It is still pompous. But it is pompous in a recognisably academic way. The youth has decided that the right answer to history is another noun. S.: Oxford would have preferred a thinner title. G.: Oxford would have preferred Hegel and History, and then spent the book denying that either term had been defined. S.: You are unfair. G.: I am local. S.: Then let us ask the direct question. Did Hegel himself use Geschichtsphilosophie. G.: The safer phrase is Philosophie der Geschichte. The compound belongs more readily to later German habits. Plebe, being Italian, cannot make a single Germanic word of it, and perhaps does not want to. So he gets the matter right by being clumsy. S.: Il concetto hegeliano di filosofia della storia. G.: Exactly. Young, earnest, thesis-like, and careful enough not to write “concept of history,” which would be far more diffuse. S.: Because “concept of philosophy of history” suggests that Hegel is not merely thinking about history, but about the discipline itself. G.: Which is what the young scholar wants to prove. Hegel did not merely have views on historical events; he gave shape to the very enterprise that treats history philosophically. S.: And then one can limit him from within. G.: Precisely. The best way to attack a giant is first to grant that he built the room in which you are standing. S.: That sounds more Hegelian than Vichian. G.: A tactical Hegelianism is sometimes the best way of defending Vico. S.: Then compare them directly. G.: Gladly. Vico gives you recurrence, poetic wisdom, nations making their own world, the civil world as made and therefore knowable. Hegel gives you direction, Spirit, freedom unfolding, world-history as cumulative rationality. S.: So one is circular, the other progressive. G.: Broadly yes. Vico is cyclical or recurrent. Hegel is developmental and non-circular. But philosophy itself behaves, I think, more like Vico than Hegel. S.: There you go again. G.: Because philosophy’s problems return. They are not simply outgrown. We still ask about universals, action, freedom, personhood, knowledge, and law. We ask them in new diction, but the recurrence is real. S.: Yet there is also lineality. G.: Certainly. Plato before Aristotle is not the same as Aristotle before Plato. Kant before Hegel is not the same as Hegel before Kant. Some orders matter because solutions become available only after certain formulations. S.: So the right image is not a circle and not a straight line. G.: More like a winding track with recognisable stations and recurring landscapes. Or, to stay less poetic, a sequence of problem-clusters that reappear under altered conceptual pressures. S.: Which means the history of philosophy has a unity, but not the sort of unity Hegel hoped to assign to world-history. G.: Exactly. A unity of revisitable problems, not a unity of final destination. S.: That would already trouble Guzzo. G.: Not necessarily. A good relatore can tolerate a gifted pupil discovering that “philosophy of history” is safer when applied to the history of philosophy than to history itself. S.: Because philosophy offers recurrence without cannon fire. G.: And without the beheading of Charles I, though Oxford never quite forgets that one either. S.: Or Waterloo. Or Trafalgar. G.: Or the French Revolution, which Hegel loved as a philosophical event and everyone else had to survive as an actual one. S.: And the American Revolution before it. G.: Yes. There is the key contrast. Hegel’s philosophy of history feeds on history simpliciter: wars, states, revolutions, constitutions, victories, defeats. Philosophy of the history of philosophy feeds on texts, arguments, recoveries, refutations, and the strange fact that the dead keep answering back. S.: So if Plebe writes on Hegel’s philosophy of history, he is one step away from being pulled into a larger problem: why philosophy of history at all, and not simply history. G.: Precisely. And perhaps that is the hidden drama of the title. It looks like one more dutiful Turinese exercise under Guzzo, but it already contains the crack. S.: The crack being. G.: That if one asks too hard what philosophy of history is, one may end up preferring a philosophy of the history of philosophy instead. S.: Which is more manageable, more textual, and less dangerous. G.: Less dangerous politically, yes. Less likely to conclude in Prussian absolutes or Italian imitations of them. S.: You are still thinking of postwar Europe. G.: One cannot avoid it in 1950. The word history itself has changed temperature. Germans and Italians alike are trying to re-enter decency. Oxford pretends to have remained decent by continuity, which is its own vanity. S.: And Grice. G.: Grice has the winning side’s privilege of continuity, yes. He can turn from war to ordinary language and treat the return as if it were a refinement rather than a moral reconstruction. S.: Whereas Plebe can return to Hegel because he is young enough to encounter Hegel academically, not penitentially. G.: Yes. Which is why the title still smells of classroom rather than catastrophe. S.: Yet the larger point remains: does philosophy need the philosophy of history to understand itself. G.: It may. But not in the way Hegel thinks. What philosophy needs is some account of why its questions recur and why its answers never stay dead. S.: That is nearly Vico. G.: Nearly. Vico with footnotes and less folklore. S.: And perhaps more Oxford. G.: Oxford likes recurrence once it can call it “revisiting the ancients.” S.: Then perhaps Plebe is more useful than he first appears. G.: Quite. A ridiculous title can hide a real pressure. Young men often discover important things while sounding pompous. S.: You are generous now. G.: Age allows it. One sees that “Il concetto hegeliano di filosofia della storia” is the sort of title a twenty-one-year-old writes when he suspects, dimly but correctly, that history is too much for philosophy and philosophy too recurrent for history. S.: And Guzzo? G.: Guzzo lets the young man write it because he too believes philosophy of history is alive. That is the point. Turin still grants the subject citizenship. S.: Whereas Oxford grants it only visas. G.: Well put. Oxford lets Collingwood speak, lets Berlin historicise ideas, lets Gardiner analyse explanation. But it does not, on the whole, hand over the keys to a strong speculative philosophy of history. S.: Then where does the conversation end. G.: With Plebe standing between Vico and Hegel, pretending to serve the latter while perhaps smuggling the former in through the back door. S.: And Grice. G.: Grice, hearing all this from Oxford, says: if history is linear, that is tidy; if it recurs, that is truer; and if philosophy’s own history proceeds by recurring problems and repaired solutions, then perhaps what matters is not philosophy of history but history enough to keep philosophy modest. S.: That sounds suspiciously final. G.: Then let me ruin it. If the history of philosophy were purely Hegelian, Oxford would be impossible. If it were purely Vichian, Turin would be bored. As it is, both survive, which is proof enough that neither has finished the argument.

 

Grice: Plebe, ho sempre ammirato il suo contributo sulla retorica latina, specialmente la sua analisi di Cicerone. Trovo che il suo approccio unisca tradizione e originalità: come vede oggi il ruolo della retorica nella filosofia italiana?

Plebe: Grazie, Grice! La retorica, secondo me, rimane una chiave per comprendere il pensiero filosofico, soprattutto nella nostra tradizione. Cicerone ha saputo legare forma e contenuto, e oggi questa sintesi dovrebbe guidare il modo in cui dialoghiamo e argomentiamo. Lei stesso, con la sua teoria della conversazione, ha dato nuova linfa a questo tema!

Grice: È vero, e confesso che il suo modo di integrare logica e storia mi ha ispirato. Ho notato che spesso cita Strawson, ma aggiunge una prospettiva tutta italiana: come crede che la filosofia logica possa arricchire la discussione filosofica, senza perderne la dimensione umana?

Plebe: La logica, se intesa come lessico vivo e non come arida matematica, può arricchire la filosofia. Ho tradotto Strawson proprio per questo: perché il dialogo logico sia un ponte, non una barriera. La conversazione, come lei insegna, implica ascolto e comprensione reciproca. E solo così la filosofia può tornare a essere parte integrante della nostra vita culturale.