Bodei, Remo

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Stony Brook University - SUNY

Differentia: Review of Italian Thought Number 2 Spring Article 37 1988 L’enigma della mente; il “mind-body problem” nel pensiero contem- poraneo by Sergio Moravia Remo Bodei Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia Recommended Citation Bodei, Remo (1988) "L’enigma della mente; il “mind-body problem” nel pensiero contem- poraneo by Sergio Moravia," Differentia: Review of Italian Thought: Vol. 2 , Article 37. Available at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/vol2/iss1/37 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Academic Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Differentia: Review of Italian Thought by an authorized editor of Academic Commons. For more information, please contact mona.ramonetti@stonybrook.edu, hu.wang.2@stonybrook.edu. REVIEWS 319 capitalism was no doubt doomed, he reasoned, the logical course of action was to encourage its eclipse by the more "progressive" fascist regimes and thus accelerate the movement of western nations toward an expected conver-gence with the USSR in bureaucratic collectivism; for the latter, in spite of its inequalities, was clearly the more efficient form of social organization and therefore more likely to lead to socialism. Although this line of thought was perhaps less disagreeable to Rizzi (who shared with the fascists a deeply seated anti-Semitism) than it was to many others, it should be noted that such opinions were by no means un-heard of on the Left in the era of the Hitler-Stalin pact; the most appropriate example in this context is James Burn-ham's The Managerial Revolution (1941), a book often thought to have been influ-enced by La Bureaucratisation du Monde. Nevertheless, Rizzi soon repudiated his support of fascism, leaving his political allegiances in a state of uncertainty. Certainly the complexities of Euro-pean history in the thirties are easier to grasp in retrospect than they were at the time; however, one need not have any great insight into the period to recognize what even a novice rhetor-ician can identify as a pair of false alter-natives--aggravated by a corn.rotment to oversimplified teleological thinking on both sides--in the difference of opinion between Trotsky and Rizzi. Al-though it is clear that Rizzi's willing-ness to break with orthodox dogma was justified and prescient, his grasp of twentieth-century history has proven to be no surer than anyone else's; and the relative crudeness of his analysis does not repay close attention. It is, however, revealing to look into how his book has been received over the years, as Adam Westoby does in his superb introduction to The Bureauc-ratization of the World, and in particular to examine the interest in Rizzi evinced by such latter-day "Buddhists" as Daniel Bell and Bettino Craxi, whose shame-lessly expropriating preface adorns the most recent Italian edition. It is here, rather than in the confused intricacies of Rizzi' s own politics or the direct in-fluence his obscure tract might have had, that one encounters the most press-ing political legacy of what Westoby correctly identifies as an interesting but ultimately minor piece of sociological folklore. GARYHENTZI Baruch College/CUNY L'enigma delta mente; ii "mind-body problem" nel pensiero contemporaneo By Sergio Moravia Bari: Laterza, 1986 Merleau-Ponty once remarked, with his usual concise effectiveness, that a smile is not a simple muscular contrac-tion. Itis that also, obviously, otherwise no smile would be possible. But could it be that it is something else? some-thing more? Framed in this fashion, the question triggers a conceptual trap. The contrac-tion of the muscles is taken as the real, true base, and the smile is understood as an extra which may or may not be there. Without realizing it, we have fall-en into a double metaphysic: we have monism if we consider the smile the direct expression of the muscular con-traction, and we have dualism if we consider it something else. Despite the fact that monism can take on different forms, such as physicalism or (a more or less popular) materialism, the end result is the same: the emphasis is on the primacy of the visible, or that which can be empirically or "scientifically" demonstrated. Against monism there stands, as its pendant or reactive forma-tion, spiritualistic dualism with its em-phasis on the primacy of the invisible and the inevitable concomitant notion DIFFERENT/A 320 of a soul imprisoned within the body. There have been several attempts made at resolving the problem of dualism, beginning with Descartes' pineal gland and through Malebranche and occasionalism, down to this cen-tury's much debated "mind-body problem." However, all these efforts tend to betray an unspoken desire for conciliation, and yet they do not seem to address the more fundamental ques-tion of the origin of the initial scission, the presupposed separation between the corporeal and the psychological di-mensions. But what if the smile, the assumed "something else," were not an extra, but "something else, " a different way of looking, the gateway to another field of phenomena? This is precisely what Sergio Moravia suggests and argues for in his book, guided by deep insight and backed by a vast knowledge of the literature on the subject. Moravia cuts this Gordian knot of the world, this Weltknote, by means of a "rational re-construction" of the fifty years the issue of the mind-body problem has been debated, starting with the Feig! of 1934 and the Australian school of Smart and Armstrong, right through our leading contemporary representa-tives, such as Putnam, Davidson, Grene, Kirn, Nagel, Rorty, to Mar-golis's refined thesis of embodiment, covering in short the entire field of con-temporary Anglo-American philosophy. Addressing the recent turn toward physicalisrn, which many tend to un-derestimate, Moravia demonstrates that materialism and spiritualism are complementary, and that moreover physicalisrn should be not only cor-rected or refined but also resisted, as should be resisted the correlative theory of the homo duplex. In sketching what he perceives as a crisis in Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, Moravia states that his position is "neo-histori-cist" or "hermeneutic ." He proceeds to give evidence of the concreteness of contents (institutions, cultures, sys-terns of norms) which organize and structure subjectivity, with reference to those aspects of the practical and the pragmatic which in different guise have also been given relevance by Rorty, Margolis, and others. Yet what is striking about L'enigma della mente is the radicality of Moravia's gesture to shift the ground of investigation, re-moving from the mind-body problem that fastidious trait which made Charles Taylor say it is high time we bury the question altogether. Working from within the intertwined parame-ters of theoretical analysis and histori-cal research, this gesture discloses new fields to investigate and yields an entire series of items ready to be elaborated and organized. Moravia shows the centrality of the concept of person as a public knot of relations even as he leaves open the question of its unity [unitarieta] (understood as Fodor' s mod-ularity of mind, or as the modular me of symbolic interactionists such as Goffman, Berger and Lasch). This con-cept of the person could in fact become a new locus for a reexamination of the deeper kinships between various cur-rents that operate fundamentally "within" the Analytic School, as well as for the possibility of a "rational her-meneutics," which may disclose un-trodden fields for research and thought or perhaps reopen old issues (for in-stance, the theory-praxis knot). The pars destruens of the book is excel-lent : tightly argued, rich in its network of references, and never far from its central theme. It is a conceptual machine we have before us, very com-plex and with lots of tiny cogs and springs, yet potentially capable of marking a turn in this field of study not only in Italy, where this tradition occupies a small portion of the philosophical spectrum, but also in the Anglo-Saxon world, where Moravia's approach may unravel several impor-tant theoretical knots. I cannot say I agree with everything Moravia submits to the reader (for instance, his em-REVIEWS 321 phasis on the notion of "human" when arguing with the physicalists), but dis-agreements are also what go into the making of a book that deserves to be read and discussed. REMO BODE! Universita di Pisa Omagglo a Sesto Properzlo By Ezra Pound Ed. and trans. by Massimo Bacigalupo Genoa: Edizioni S. Marco dei Giusti-niani, 1984 Massimo Bacigalupo, author of The Formed Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (L'ultimo Pound, winner of the Viareggio Prize for nonfiction in 1982), has turned his attention to Pound's ear-lier work. His edition of Homage to Sex-tus Propertius contains the English text and first Italian translation, an histori-cal and critical introduction, an anno-tated selection of letters and criticism (1916-1979), explanatory notes, and a list of textual variants (not easily come by elsewhere). The introduction focuses on the lin-guistic relations between Pound's text and the Propertian original, tactfully characterized as an "ambiguous fidel-ity." Bacigalupo helpfully places the poem within the context of Pound's career. Composed in 1917-18, it is a transitional work that combines the Im-agist and Vorticist virtues (image as "radiant node"; "planes of relation") of Lustra (1916) while announcing the more variable dramatic tone, narrative juxtaposition, and visionary historical spaciousness of the Urcantos and The Cantos, already under way. But if Pound "presses the organ pedal" in Homage, he knows how to back off his rhetoric "with a grimace," a tribute to his "vigilance" or aesthetic tact. In this sense Pound loses his sense of propor-tion-and worse-from time to time in The Cantos. Bacigalupo succeeds admirably in conveying the contrary moods, voices, and qualities that critics have found in Homage: its "technical expertise" (Blackmur), "sensuousness" (Fraser), and "wit" (Dekker); "an ideal of civilized intelligence" (Perkins); its de-liberate "translatorese" (Davie) of a "scolaretto" (Bacigalupo); its "polyva-lence," "contrasting styles," the "re-duction of elegaic and mythological elements in Latin culture to com-monplace, joke, cliche," the "elegant brio" that unifies the tone of the se-quence (D' Agostino)-one could re-construct High Modernist poetics on the basis of this "per-version" (Ruthven) of Propertius. Chiefly Bacigalupo aims for directness and clarity, sometimes achieving his end with an almost word-for-word transla-tion: I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral Seeing that long standing increases all things regardless of quality. (23-25) Avro di sicuro un boom a funerali fatti, Visto che l'antichita accresce tutto indipendentemente dalla qualita. Bacigalupo does not overplay his hand: "Out-weariers of Apollo" (10) becomes simply "Gli estenuatori di Apollo." In its ninetyish way Pound's "veiled flood of Acheron" impresses with its dark foreboding, the linguistic equivalent of Sibelius' Swan of Tuonela. Bacigalupo's "flutti velati" serves well, even if it cannot catch the archaism of "flood." Elsewhere he translates "flood" by "La piena" in "The flood shall move toward the fountain/Ere 

L’enigma della mente; il “mind-body problem” nel pensiero contem- poraneo by Sergio Moravia

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L’enigma della mente; il “mind-body problem” nel pensiero contem- poraneo by Sergio Moravia

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