Filosofia, diritto e storia in Gianvincenzo Gravina

The approach to the study of Gravina was conceived with the deliberate but not concealed aim of putting forward a viewpoint, the philosophical-juridical one, as observation point for the“total” history of a long experience both in a chronological sense (from the Neapolitan formation of the erudite man of letters to the maturity of the critical and theoretical discourse of the Tragedies) as well as in an ideological sense. For this proposal it appeared essential to reconstruct also what was written and published before and during the composition of the two more well-known works, namely the Ragion poeticae and the Origines iuriscivilis. Based on the arcane sapiential-jurisprudential formulae of humanistic tradition, the impulse to reflect on the ius, in Gravina, is not extraneous to a critical instance of existence. His filosofiaè is that which is in accordance with the humanistic perspective and is expressed in the struggle for libertas philosophandi against the dogmatism of Jesuistic «casuistry» . Thus the choice arose of shedding light on the features and outcomes of Gravina’s participation in a form of Cartesianism proposed in a neo-Platonic and Christian interpretation, capable of defending against empiricism and the opposing outcomes of mentalism of a Jansenist matrix. What prevails is the value of the recta ratio, testimony in the Egloghe, in the Discorso sopra l’Endimione, and in the Ragion poetica of the author’s ethical rigorism, also present at the juridical level. In it motives are present for the battle for the legislation reform, emblem of the anti-feudal dispute in an attempt to recover the special interests in the rational order of the lex of the State. In my pages the theme has relaunched the comparison with the models of late sixteenth-century Italian and French culture(Carlo Sigonio Nicolas de Grouchy and Bodin) and has reproposed the seventeenth-century model of rational concentration, in its absolute power, trasformed, however, in the juridical-institutional writings (from the two books of the De Romano Imperio, from the De Imperio et Iurisdictione to the less known books Institutionum Iuris Civilis Receptioris and Receptioris Iuris Specimen) by the distinction and reciprocal autonomy of government activity and iurisdictio, without however, having any recourse to forms of proto-constitutionalism. But to confirm the complexity and originality of these theses is a certain resumption and also a transfiguration of the traditional themes of the Ratio Status, present in Gravina’s style and language which uses, by refuting them, argumentative modules typical of seventeenth–century tacitism and contemporary Machiavellism. All of which comes about (and this is a token always held in consideration in my pages, but often eluding critical literature) with the proposal of “prudential” agreements (in the Orationes), proof of the backwardness and modernity of a thinker not content with repeating past solutions, but disposed towards tackling them from an updated political and cultural viewpoint and, yet, not always endowed with adequate intellectual power. This is borne out by the impotence of the ius sapientioris to solve the iustitia-stultitia dichotomy intensifying a decisive change in accent which transforms the initial optimism of the Egloghe and the Orationes into the dark pessimism of the Tragedies. An unbridgeable gap opens up with regard to the theses of the Origines and the De Romano Imperio. To the modified distance between the mens and the facts there corresponds the recognition of the order of the world as being unchangeable and the primate of a norm transcending the human universe. Finally, Gravina must favour the commitment of this model of philosophy of light towards heaven, transfering the functions of illuminated guidance from the holder of the ius sapientioris to the grace God’s. Being both gratuitous and unforeseeable the latter points to the tragic conflict between the celestial city and the terrestial one, thereby complicating the relationships between lex solius mentis and lex promiscua from the philosophical-juridical viewpoint. All of which implies the abandonment of the tradition of Christian heroism and the confutation of that pedagogical-civil level of intervention, taught at Caloprese’s school wherein the study of the Port-Royal writings proved deliberately integrated with that of the works of Bossuet and Baronio. At a philosophical level the theme makes an introduction to one of the main aims of the research, which may be summed up in the documented proposal of Gravina’s refounding - by reconciling them with the various instances of historical investigation and rational method - of Cartesian evidence and of historical fact. It was above all a question of reconstructing during the years of Gravina’s formation the reasons for his historical study on the ius publicum in the school of Aulisio and, more especially, in that of Biscardi. With argumentations aimed at fomenting the entire theoretical and historiographical framework of the Origines the historicization of the Roman Law is enhanced through a trial, complicated at its origins by the formation of the laws of the XII Tables. This significantly transfers the centre of the investigation from the nature of the polis to man in the civitas, to the modern rational lex constitutive of its existing and of the relative historical contents which radically modify the physiognomy of modern iusnaturalism. The study of the origins of civil law and reflection on the sense of his internal life come together in order to render the historical investigation compatible with systematical-universal aspiration. In Gravina’s project of a methodological reformation of the study of the law the problem remains open of the history and of its cognitive legitimization in a juridical setting.The latter is a proposal of interpretation, which on transforming the prerogatives of the «philosophy of the mind» onto a juridical plain, proves to be tuned on the interests and perspectives of contemporary southern historico-philosophical culture, involved, after the years of its investigative experimentalism, in being theorizeed as a system, already in Doria and in Vico. Not by chance the investigation started from this last source (in appendix of the present volume) on Gravina’s destiny in the early eighteenth-century German and Dutch world. And this is the fortune of the historian and jurist of the circle of the Mencke and of Jean Le Clerc, promotors respectively of the reviews published in the «Acta Eruditorum Lipsiensium» (1703-1708) and in the «BibliothèqueAncienne et Moderne» (1718), both little investigated by traditional literature (as also that of Vico), yet significant for identifying the contemporary cultural debate, as attested by the recalled Metastasio inspirations to Gravina of the Tragedies and the pages of Caloprese, the Cartesian philosopher intent on redefining the theme of fantasy between poetry and philosophy prior to Vico, the «first discoverer of aesthetics» with the imaginative universal «universale fantastico». This is one of the underlying themes of Croce’s interpretation of the Ragion poetica, present in the chapters of the Estetica and of the Problems of Aesthetics of the early twentieth century, before merging into the innovative pages of the Storia dell’età barocca (1929) regarding the redefinition of the seventeenth century as distinct from a «nothing artistic» Baroque