In Del Noce the key to understanding our time

Marcello Veneziani

In my readings online from Italy I encountered Del Noce. I found a very congenial spirit. “American intellectuals were happy because, as Michele Federico Sciacca pointed out with remarkable foresight in 1954,12 “even if society in the United States calls itself Christian, American philosophy is essentially all atheistic. Not only that: it is marked by the idolatry of science, the tool that will radically change humanity by producing technical development, and will bring to mankind all the happiness that man by his ‘nature’ can desire.” In this way, the gap in America between a progressive culture and a reactionary political world was filled.”

The Crisis of Modernity

Noce, Augusto Del; Carlo Lancellotti;

Who was Augusto Del Noce? He was a reclusive philosopher who thought of Italy as the laboratory of ideas in which the history of the world is incubated; the Italy in which fascism was born and Marxism was surpassed, then entered the Atlantic and Christian Democrat orbit, crossed by '68 and Gramscism, dominated by anti-fascism, scientism and de-Christianization, and finally by the "radical mass party" and "gay nihilism".
As a young man I had the honor of frequenting him in the eighties and of collaborating with him on several occasions; Del Noce proposed me to the cultural pages of Il Tempo and Il Sabato and wrote the preface to my Processo all'Occidente which was his last writing before dying, at the end of 1989. Few know him, few talk about him; but those few, although distant from his thought, write about him with enormous consideration, from Massimo Cacciari to Giacomo Marramao, to Roberto Esposito. And instead, in a cursory reading – supported by Norberto Bobbio, Lucio Colletti and Gianni Vattimo – Del Noce was pigeonholed as a traditionalist Catholic, counter-reformist and anti-modernist, a redivivus de Maistre. In reality Del Noce criticized traditionalism and anti-modernism, he experimented with modernity, its authors and its themes, he criticized progressivism but did not dream of returning to the counter-reformation. Instead, he posed the need for a religious and civil reform and for a “creative restoration”, as Gabriel Marcel had spoken of creative fidelity.
Now Luciano Lanna has dedicated a wide and in-depth study to Del Noce with a very indicative title: Crossing modernity, although accompanied by a subtitle that recalls the “untimeliness” of Del Noce’s thought. Published by Cantagalli with a beautiful preface by Giacomo Marramao, Lanna’s essay – which we presented at the Treccani Institute in Rome – carefully reconstructs Del Noce’s philosophical path and removes it from the anti-modern and traditionalist reduction into which he was forced. Del Noce’s thought, in fact, cannot even be defined as conservative or reactionary, categories in which Del Noce did not recognize himself. In his opinion, the limit of anti-modern and traditionalist positions is that of stopping the truth at a historical moment in the past, elevating it to absolute truth; an error symmetrical to the progressive or revolutionary one that elevates the present or the future to absolute value. Del Noce instead distinguishes between history and meta-history, between being and becoming, between time and truth. His true reference author is Giambattista Vico, who did not oppose his time by regretting the past but outlined another possible modernity. Like Vico, Del Noce also saw in tradition not the cult of the past but the thread of continuity in the light of Being, in its historical unfolding; tradition transmits what lives and endures, does not guard relics, does not dream of going back and does not live with regrets.
According to Lanna, Vico according to Del Noce is a continuator of Descartes, intent on saving modern history from irreligion and atheism. In reality, Vico opposed Descartes and above all the rationalism of the Cartesians who had “Frenchified” the Neapolitan literary society of his time, from which the Vesuvian Enlightenment would later emerge. Vico recognized, as Del Noce would later do, that reason is not the absolute queen but between God and the world there is history, tradition, the common feeling of peoples, real experience, the hand of Providence. Cogito ergo sum, for Vico, establishes a subjectivist claim: it is not the self that thinks being but it is being that thinks in me. Being precedes and establishes the self, not the opposite. Vico criticized Renato Delle Carte, as he called Descartes, but not to return to Scholasticism and the Middle Ages, but rather to recognize the relationship between providence and history, between myth and thought, between ancient knowledge and new science; and also between authority and truth as between the true and the fact (or the certain). Along that line we also find Del Noce, who was perhaps his true heir in the twentieth century. History, for Vico as for Del Noce, often reverses the intentions of its protagonists (heterogenesis of ends).
Like Vico, Del Noce raised the theme of the rebirth of nations. And he thought of a new Rebirth, a category very different from the Restoration or the Revolution. For him, the Rebirth was a religious and historical expression at the same time, resurrection and civil regeneration, and it strengthened Christianity and patriotism, Catholicism and nation. A theme also dear to John Paul II.
Del Noce saw in fascism the national and spiritual fulfillment of Marxism; he believed that fascism was already in embryo in Giovanni Gentile's early work, Philosophy of Marx, from 1899. On this theme I addressed objections to him, believing that in reality fascism recognized itself more in Sorel's voluntarism and was a Nietzschean fulfillment of Marxism; and its essence was more the political continuation of the D'Annunzio and Futurist aesthetic vision. Moreover, Gentile was not read and never cited by Mussolini, unlike Sorel, Nietzsche and even Croce, at least until the fascist regime, when he entrusted Gentile with the ministry of public education to complete Croce's reform of the school. Gentile's hegemony during fascism was highly contested; in one of my books I reconstructed the many anti-Gentilian strands within fascism. My objections were valid on the historical level in relation to ideas, but Del Noce was developing a rigorous philosophical thesis: Gentile had accomplished on the theoretical level what fascism would have accomplished on the historical level.
I made another objection to Del Noce on the suicide of the revolution in Gramsci (and alongside Gentile who was its main inspirer). Gramsci, Del Noce argued, sought a compromise with the progressive bourgeoisie to conquer power; thus he replaced anti-capitalism with anti-fascism and propitiated the suicide of the revolution in the arms of the new bourgeoisie and the new capitalism, thus laying the foundations for the passage from communism to liberal-progressive radicalism. This will happen starting from '68; here Del Noce's thought coincided with Pasolini's vision.
Acute and anticipatory analysis, almost prophetic; but if we want to fully grasp the meaning of our time, I objected, we must recognize that the suicide of the revolution is intertwined with the suicide of conservation. From both and in reaction to both, fascism was born, which tried to be a conservative revolution. What remains after fascism of that double suicide is the interminable decomposition in which not only Italy but also Europe and the West found themselves; dissolution remained from the revolution and stagnation from conservation. When the conservative revolution failed, its opposite occurred, dissolving stagnation. Del Noce was its most coherent critic and saw the emergence of that “gay nihilism”, the last stage of Western irreligion. Compared to this current situation, Lanna is right, Del Noce's thought remains out of date.

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