The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger by Rocco Rubini (review)

The Other Renaissance explores in detail the role of Renaissance Humanism in shaping the intellectual tradition of modern Italian philosophy.

Rocco Rubini’s research arises from his interest in unpacking two coeval and parallel debates that occurred in the aftermath of World War II. The first one sees Sartre’s existential humanism pitted against Heidegger’s anti-humanism whose resolute rejection of Cartesian subjectivism had far-reaching consequences, leading to “the anti-humanist sentiment that shaped our post-modern consciousness” (3). Conspicuously absent from the existentialist discussion is Renaissance Humanism, to which it is reserved a baffling indifference. This omission, Rubini remarks, is not just lamentable, but it is also quite paradoxical. Despite clear parallels between existentialism and humanism, existentialists removed Renaissance Humanism from the discussion, thus failing to recognize “their anti-Cartesianism as, in fact, a ‘humanism’” (5).

The second disputation, connected to the existentialist debate, revolves around the question if Renaissance Humanism can be considered a philosophy, and has as main protagonists Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller. To reconcile the interpretations of these two scholars, Rubini looks back at the origins of modern Renaissance studies. He identifies a tradition in Italian interpretation—parallel, but distinct from the German line stemming from Jakob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance Italy—which attempts “another” account of the Renaissance, in philosophical thought. In a telling coincidence, this Italian lineage originated, with Bertrando Spaventa, in 1860, the same year in which Burckhardt’s work was published. Even more significant is the fact that it starts in the wake of the Italian unification. In the period leading to the creation of the Italian kingdom, intellectuals attempted to retroactively construct a national, Italian philosophy.

It is in these circumstances that the interpretation of the Renaissance became a crucial and enduring problem of Italian philosophy from the Risorgimento to the Fascist period and well into the postwar era. To forge their intellectual tradition, Italians were forced to face the Renaissance, and what they discovered made them “recoil in horror” (47). What was considered the moment of most intense cultural and artistic flourishing coincides with the political decline of the country, culminating in Italy’s three-century-long occupation by foreign powers, against which Italians were fighting. This realization resulted into a deep-rooted sentiment of “Renaissance shame” (7).

Rubini embarks in a thorough genealogical reconstruction of “the self-contained trajectory of Italian philosophy” (37) from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the postwar period. His aim is to demonstrate how Italian philosophers attempted to integrate and, finally, restored the Renaissance to its rightful position, as the backbone of an Italian philosophical approach.

The subtitle given to the book, “Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger,” finds its explanation in the fact that the Italian intellectual tradition, while struggling to find its place in the European scenario, could not eschew the influence of Hegel’s idealism and Heidegger’s existentialism.

It was Bertrando Spaventa who, striving to free Italian philosophy from its isolation, turned to Hegel, whose idealism could not only support the Italian unification but also settle that which Renaissance philosophy could not. More specifically, Spaventa sees German thought as the natural continuation of Renaissance’s philosophy. Thus the “Renaissance shame” could be overcome by demonstrating that its intellectual tradition had matured and thrived elsewhere. However, the irreparable ‘fault’ of the Renaissance lay within the individualism of its letterati that manifested itself in their utter carelessness toward the political and military situation of their country.

This conviction persisted well into the twentieth century in scholars such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. Although belonging to this tradition, Gentile represents a fundamental turning point. In shifting his attention from the vernacular to the Latin writers, Gentile rescued the Latin Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla and many more from oblivion. In these humanist figures’ fierce opposition to scholasticism and their celebration of the centrality and dignity of man, Gentile sees the precursors of “the freedom of spirit of...