Abstract
This paper deals with the early entrance of phenomenology in Italy (1923–1926). It focuses on the work of Antonio Banfi, from his early essays devoted to Husserl’s work to the release of his main work, the Principi di una teoria della ragione. It emphasizes the essential role of Husserl’s philosophy in the evolution of Italian thought. It pays special attention to the relevance of phenomenology for the development of a transcendental philosophy in Italy. Finally, it suggests that Banfi’s philosophy sets key conceptual tools for thinking of philosophy as a cross-cultural endeavor.
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Notes
- 1.
Banfi, Antonio. 1923. La tendenza logistica nella filosofia tedesca contemporanea e le “Ricerche logiche” di Edmund Husserl. Rivista di filosofia 14:115–133; Banfi, Antonio. 1923. La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl e l’autonomia ideale della sfera teoretica. Rivista di filosofia 14:208–224. Previous occasional references to Husserl can be traced back to Francesco De Sarlo, Gaetano Capone Braga, and Guido De Ruggiero, see: Mocchi, Mauro. 1990. Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia. Il dibattito sulla fenomenologia: 1923–1940. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 11–14.
- 2.
Banfi never deflected from this interest: even in the early 1940s, he chose to inaugurate his journal Studi filosofici (1940–1949) by a review article titled “Situazione della filosofia contemporanea”. The importance of crisis in his work has been underlined by Neri, Guido Davide. 1988. Crisi e costruzione della storia: gli sviluppi del pensiero di Antonio Banfi. Naples: Bibliopolis; Paci, Enzo. 1958. Vita e ragione in Antonio Banfi. aut aut 43–44:56–66; Scarantino, Luca Maria. 2007. Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
- 3.
Paci, Vita e ragione in Antonio Banfi; Paci, Enzo. 1969. Antonio Banfi vivente. In: Antonio Banfi e il pensiero contemporaneo. Atti del Convegno di studi banfiani (Reggio Emilia, 13–14 maggio 1967) 34–45. Florence: La Nuova Italia.
- 4.
Papi, Fulvio. 1961. Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi. Florence: Parenti.
- 5.
Sini, Carlo. 1965. La fenomenologia in Italia. Lo sviluppo storico. Revue internationale de philosophie 71–72 (1–2):125–139.
- 6.
Neri, Guido Davide. 1969. Riflessione pragmatica e riflessione teoretica in Banfi. In: Antonio Banfi e il pensiero contemporaneo, 18–33.
- 7.
Salemi, Roselina. 1976. Antonio Banfi, the First Italian Interpreter of Phenomenology. In: The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana ix, ed. Anna-Teresa Timienecka, 441–459. Dordrecht: Reidel.
- 8.
Banfi, Antonio. 1926. Principi di una teoria della ragione [PTR]. Turin: Paravia.
- 9.
Ibid., 570.
- 10.
For the wide extent of Banfi’s influence on Italian culture, with particular focus on the journal Corrente, see Scarantino, Luca Maria. 2004. Giulio Preti (Pavia 1911–Djerba 1972): A Critical Rationalist. Diogenes 202:141–147; Scarantino, Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale.
- 11.
Banfi, La tendenza logistica, 127.
- 12.
Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 211.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid., 213.
- 15.
Paci remarked that Banfi focused on phenomenology to portray how “praxis and historicity were brought together;” in Paci’s view, such a reading was “almost miraculous” in 1926, as it was only validated by the publication of Ideen II in 1952. (Paci, Antonio Banfi vivente, 40). Salemi developed a similar argument in terms of Banfi “forerunning” later developments of Husserl’s philosophy. (See Salemi, Antonio Banfi, the First Italian Interpreter of Phenomenology, 448ff.). See also Papi, Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi.
- 16.
Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 213.
- 17.
Ibid., 215.
- 18.
Ibid., 223.
- 19.
Ibid., 224.
- 20.
PTR, 579–580.
- 21.
Ibid., 580.
- 22.
Ibid., 557.
- 23.
Ibid. (See Banfi, La tendenza logistica, 125). Even more pertinent would be the following clause: “Even if the laws of logic were just normative interpretations of psychological regularities, such that these would justify them, they would be valid for psychological facts only; while they indeed refer to facts that go beyond psychological processes, to spheres of objectivity whose validity does not depend on psychology.” PTR, 558.
- 24.
Ibid., 561. “It is fair to say that Husserl’s main concern is to provide a universal theoretical organization that not only brings together the complex diversity of experience, but also gathers the various directions of knowledge under a consistent, rational meaning.” Ibid., 669.
- 25.
Ibid., 569.
- 26.
Ibid., 563.
- 27.
Ibid., 562.
- 28.
Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 212.
- 29.
Ibid., 52.
- 30.
PTR, 231.
- 31.
Ibid. We find again the same assessment at the end of the PTR. Banfi states that “the method of pragmatism” sheds light onto “the practical and pragmatic instances of every conceptual objectivity, as well as of every philosophical synthesis provided by intuition,” and adds that this task “is not only fully justified, but it shall also be developed in a universal direction, in order to overcome the abstract conceptual realism, a fallacy that empiricism shares with dogmatic rationalism.” Ibid., 583. See also Banfi, Antonio. 1925. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung. Rivista di Filosofia 16:73–81 (74)—where “transcendental idealism, rationalism, and empiricism come together” in Husserl’s philosophy. Enzo Paci remarked that Banfi’s philosophy could be seen as a “pragmatic transcendentalism of reason.” Paci, Vita e ragione in Antonio Banfi, 63.
- 32.
PTR, 99–100. See also: ibid., 566 and ibid., 567, where phenomenology is described as the science “of the synthetic and transcendental structure of reality.”
- 33.
Ibid., 63–64. It may be observed that quotations from the PTR leap from the final pages of the volume to earlier parts of it. This may require some explanation: the first part of the increase size of PTR presents Banfi’s own philosophical tenets, while the second half provides a thorough historical survey of the theories of reason in modern philosophy. It is only through the interplay of these two parts that we can isolate and observe the role that phenomenology played in the formation of Banfi’s transcendentalism.
- 34.
See Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 211—where he states that neo-Kantian philosophy has indeed purified the transcendental standpoint, but at the same time stresses that the need for a sphere of thought freed from the dogmatism of reality “is merely postulated here: hence (…) its tendency to change its nature of thought as concrete philosophical knowledge into a fundamental and radical being of thought.” These themes are present everywhere in the PTR.
- 35.
PTR, 570.
- 36.
Ibid., 571.
- 37.
See Banfi, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung. Rivista di Filosofia 16; Banfi, Antonio. 1926. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung. Rivista di Filosofia 17:175–179.
- 38.
Banfi, Antonio. Filosofia fenomenologica. La Cultura 10:463–472; Banfi, Antonio. 1939. Edmund Husserl. Civiltà moderna 11:52–63; Banfi, Antonio. 1939. La fenomenologia e il compito del pensiero contemporaneo. Revue internationale de philosophie 1 (2):326–341.
- 39.
See Salemi, Antonio Banfi, the First Italian Interpreter of Phenomenology, 459.
- 40.
Banfi, Antonio. 1967. Tre maestri. In: Umanità. Pagine autobiografiche raccordate da Daria Banfi Malaguzzi. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Franco. 122–123.
- 41.
See Banfi, Edmund Husserl, 52. Husserl “rediscovered the idea of reason, he affirmed its absolute validity as a rule of philosophy and of knowledge altogether, translated it into an open, systematic organization of experience, and lived and shed light on the spiritual meaning and value of such new wisdom.” An analysis of Banfi’s essays “Edmund Husserl” and “La fenomenologia e il compito del pensiero contemporaneo” can be found in Mocchi, Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia, 81ff.
- 42.
PTR, 571.
- 43.
Ibid., 573.
- 44.
Banfi, La fenomenologia pura di E. Husserl, 222.
- 45.
PTR, 575. “(…) here lies the main value of phenomenology: the object, whether real or ideal, is split to reveal the richness and the universality of its content, while the ideal nature of the synthesis that establishes it stems from the intentional orientation of the subject. Even the most abstract concepts observe this law, since their givenness as concepts is related to a position of the subject. And yet, is this enough to attain a universal, theoretical organization of experience? Is it not just a way to overcome the dogmatic position of the intuitive particularities of a given subjectivity?” PTR, 575. A similar criticism appears again in 1939: see Mocchi, Le prime interpretazioni di Husserl in Italia, 90; Neri, Guido Davide. 1959. Nota su Banfi, Husserl e il concetto di intuizione. aut aut 9:373–377.
- 46.
See Papi, Il pensiero di Antonio Banfi, 105.
- 47.
Preti, Giulio. 1962. Il linguaggio della filosofia. In: Preti, Giulio. 1976. Saggi filosofici. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 471. The following remark shall not be overlooked: “Our regional ontologies, our frameworks of the cultural world, will be set within the limits of a historical culture, of actually used or concretely available languages. They will be set, in other terms, in the sphere of the relative. But we must be very careful here. Once the concept of ‘absolute’ has lost its sense, so does the correlative concept of ‘relative’.” Ibid., 473–474. See also: Preti, Giulio. 2003. In principio era la carne… (1963–1964). Rivista di storia della filosofia 58:103–143 (135)—where Preti suggests that the model of “encounter” and mutual “contamination” of the sciences can be applied to formal systems of transcendental ideas, i. e. for cultures, as well.
- 48.
PTR, 576.
- 49.
This is how Preti successfully transforms the ontological necessity of the validity of representation into a historical necessity. The historicity of culture corresponds to “a particular orientation of culture, to a specific function, or to a set of specific functions, that a particular culture assigns to knowledge.” Preti, Giulio. 1976. Criticità e linguaggio perfetto. In: Saggi filosofici, 120. About the departure of Preti’s philosophy from Banfi, in whose rationalism he saw by the late 1940s the flaw of dissolving “each particular synthesis in the infinity of the idea,” see in particular Scarantino, Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale, 160–161.
- 50.
Preti, Giulio. 1976. Dewey e la filosofia della scienza. In: Saggi filosofici, 88.
- 51.
Sciacca, Michele Federico. 1997. La filosofia italiana nel secolo xx, ed. N. Incardona. Palermo: Epos. 254.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Mario Dal Pra was one of the first who designated this development under the label of Banfi’s “critical rationalism,” which alike Luciano Anceschi he traced back to the PTR. See Dal Pra, Mario. 1985. Il razionalismo critico. In: La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi 31–92. Bari: Laterza. 3; Anceschi, Luciano. 1978. L’insegnamento di Antonio Banfi. Belfagor 33:335–342 (335). A detailed analysis can be found in the first part of Scarantino, Giulio Preti. La costruzione della filosofia come scienza sociale.
- 54.
PTR, 570.
- 55.
Banfi, Antonio. 1950. Prospettiva filosofica. In: Banfi, Antonio. 1996. La ricerca della realtà. 699–721. Bologna: Il Mulino. 703.
Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Paolo Parrini and Roberta Lanfredini for having read and commented on an initial version of this essay, to Supakwadee Amatayakul for having patiently assisted me in preparing its English version, and to Federica Buongiorno for her persistent editorial tolerance.
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Scarantino, L.M. (2020). Early Phenomenology in Italy: Antonio Banfi and the Transcendental Turn in Italian Philosophy. In: Buongiorno, F., Costa, V., Lanfredini, R. (eds) Phenomenology in Italy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 106. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25397-4_2
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