In an article published on MicroMega In the 1996 – probably the last writing he left us –, Giulio Bollati (Parma, 1924 – Turin, 1996) touches on a theme that couldn’t sound more current, despite the piece being written almost thirty years ago.
With an ironic tone, as was usual for him, Bollati leaves flying very high: “Soul and body, spirit and matter: overcome countless times in speculation, this contrast has been imprinted for so long in the profound structures of Italian culture to become common sense.”
The Italians, says Bollati, are agitated in one self-imposed schizophrenia (and false) and throw themselves headlong into one papier-mâché battlefought with tenacious conviction, lining up in two hostile camps against each other armed.
There are those who use it mind and who uses the body, and the two factions never meet. Naturally the contenders do not listen to each other, and so society finds itself divided, with the “intellectuals” on the one hand, intimately convinced that “the soul is noble, the body is vile”, and civil society on the other, entirely busy developing the economy and happily unaware of the existence of the former. In short, those who do do not read and those who read do not doand this would be the key to understanding the Italian moral decadence.
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The article outlines two archetypal figures of the Italian intellectual, two exponents of the first of the two competing camps. First of all there is the “man of letters of ancient humanistic ancestry” who lives in the “cult of the past and of form”. He is the direct heir ofancien régime and looks back with nostalgia to the times when those who created culture allowed themselves long afternoons of philosophizing idleness among the pleasant fields, essentially thanks to the fact that some serfs plowed his fields for him and some servants made him find the table set upon his return from such an intense walk. For the humanist “industrialism, with its entourage of utilitarianism, democracy, mass culture, represents a mortal threat for itself and for the whole of society”.
Then, there is the radical intellectualThat “stands in defiance against power“, “claims i rights of their own class usurped by the sovereign”, but in fact he does so solely in favor of himself, magnifying “the mysterious task of his own self-reproduction” (what a sublime phrase). Neither of them cares about how the world evolves.
In short, Italian intellectuals are very busy talking about the primacy of the Spirit or the revolt against the prince, but they are very distant from those who get their hands dirty every day with oil-filled machines, with mathematical calculations, with technical production, with progress and, ultimately, with the reality of earthly things. The Marxism – concedes Bollati – had represented a novelty in this sense: in the dialectic between spirit and matter he had attempted to “make culture immanent to real processes”, but then the Italian left got sucked into the usual papier-mâché battle and everything ended in nothing.
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It is no coincidence that an article of this nature is scathing of our local intelligentsiawas written by a publisher. L’publishing it is that production sector which, more than the others, straddles the two fields, poised on the barbed wire of the border, and it is normal that from this uncomfortable position the senselessness of the battle between soul and body can be seen with particular clarity. L’editor talks to intellectuals because ultimately they are the ones who write books, but then he does his maths and tries to make the industrial production of those words economically sustainable, also because the economic stability is a necessary prerequisite forindependence of thoughtand this is exactly what it should be value much appreciated by the authors of the books.
But in Italy things are different, and everything risks ending up in a… vicious circle in which the words written by the apologists of the Spirit are very prosaically printed in noisy printing presses, assembled into volumes, distributed and finally sold to others apologists of the Spiritwho remain intensely struck by those same words, completely unaware of the material process thanks to which they were able to read them. A process that deep down they despise.
And the contradiction of Italian society, which has never fully introjected the modernity. While in Great Britain, France or Germany the manufacturing bourgeoisie managed to establish an alliance with cultural environments in the Enlightenment erawhich in turn incorporate scientific, technological and economic thought into the process of modernization, in our country this approach remains in fact minorityconfined to limited and ultimately losing cultural sectors.
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It is no coincidence that these are precisely the environments that Giulio Bollati, as an intellectual himself, studies the most. This is why he is one of the authors of choice Carlo Cattaneothe liberal, federalist, secular and enlightenment philosopher who founded the magazine in 1839 The Polytechnic (later republished by the publisher Bollati in a valuable edition), in which technical-scientific material culture has a central and formative role: “With Cattaneo, and only with him – writes Bollati – it can be said that a bourgeoisie promise fulfilledobedient to the principles of a new morality, aimed at success as the fulfillment of commitments that are both scientific and economic, of collective interest”.
They are words taken from The invention of modern Italyone collection of studies by Giulio Bollati recently revived – on the occasion of one hundred years after birth of its author – from Bollati Boringhieri, a publishing house that also bears his name.
THE AUTHOR – Michele Luzzatto is the editorial director of Bollati Boringhieri.
