Modernist Idealism : Ambivalent Legacies of German Philosophy in Italian Literature

We spoke of Italy, the painful one, we spoke of our sacrifice, our blood, of the desperate days and our undefeated hope. Do you remember? I suddenly saw two vivid teardrops flowing from your stranger's eyes. And then I recognized you as a brother; and my heart opened. -Gabriele d'Annunzio to Shimoi Harukichi, La guerra italiana (1919) 1 the authors I discuss will use versions of the word "real" to refer to the actual world in ways that create confusion, often deliberately. Numerous authors who assume an idealist stance in some form highlight the problem that results from challenging the reality of the real. This is true not only for Italian authors like Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) and Italo Svevo (Aron Ettore Schmitz, 1861-1928), whom I discuss throughout my study, but also more broadly -it is enough to think of Jorge Luis Borges's love of collapsing layers of reality with paradoxical selfreference in stories like "The Circular Ruins" and "The Garden of Forking Paths." 40 Before further articulating the stance of modernist idealism, however, it is necessary to account for the more precise and historically delimited meaning that idealism took on in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries in Europe. While there were a host of idealist thinkers in modern Europe -figures ranging from Descartes to Leibniz to Berkeleythe most prominent direction in idealist thought was the version emerging from and responding to Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) transcendental idealism. To offer a highly simplified summary, Kant argued that our knowledge of the world is only possible through the forms of human understanding -space, time, causation -that are themselves a priori forms of the human mind and not, then, properties inherent in the objects we perceive; thus what we know is always a mental construction in some important sense because the categories through which we represent objects are categories of our mind, and we have no access to a state of affairs outside of those categories, what he famously terms the The Artistic Reception of Schopenhauer 71 Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealism intervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author's main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form. Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction: Modernist Idealism Revitalizing Italy 13 1 Italy at the Banquet of Nations: Hegel in Politics and Philosophy 45 2 Italy’s Modernist Idealism and the Artistic Reception of Schopenhauer 71 3 Aesthetic Decadence and Modernist Idealism: Schopenhauer’s Literary-Artistic Legacy 93 4 Avant-Garde Idealism: The Ambivalence of Futurist Vitalism 123 5 Occult Spiritualism and Modernist Idealism: Reanimating the Dead World 148 6 Cinematic Idealism: Modernist Visions of Spiritual Vitality Mediated by the Machine 177 Conclusion: Overdetermined Idealist Legacies 207 Appendix. Schopenhauer and Leopardi: A Dialogue between A and D 211 Notes 251 Works Cited 321 Index 361 Modernist Idealism develops a framework for understanding modernist production as the artistic realization of philosophical concepts elaborated in German idealism.