‘Intuizione’ is the key word of the aesthetic philosophy of Benedetto Croce, the most influential Italian thinker of the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘Crocean half-century’, as this era in Italian culture has been described (Antoni, Mattioli 1950, 352). Croce insisted upon what he described as ‘la teoria dell’arte come pura intuizione’, and with it ‘la verità […] che l’intuizione pura è essenzialmente liricità’ (Croce 1923, 15, 22). Underlying his idealistic aesthetics, therefore, was ‘la semplicissima formola: che «l’arte è intuizione»’ (Croce 1923, 23). Widely - almost universally - adopted for decades in Italy, this formula influenced nearly all artistic creation and reception in Levi’s time. So far as I am aware, Levi’s only explicit reference to Crocean aesthetics is to be found in ‘La misura della bellezza,’ a sci-fi short story about a machine that provides an ‘objective’ judgement of beauty, wherein the narrator recounts how his wife fails to share his faith in the machine’s verdicts because she was ‘un caso disperato di educazione crociana’ (OC I, 592). Yet Croce’s influence on Levi’s thought is clear, and is attested clearly elsewhere in his work.

Appointed minister of education in 1920, Croce set in motion many of the school reforms that would subsequently be codified by the Fascist government (Rizi 2019, 6). As a result, Primo Levi’s schooling was profoundly - and to his mind negatively - influenced by Croce. This point emerges most clearly in Levi’s reflections on the education he received from Azelia Arici, who taught him Italian literature for three years, inspiring in him ‘una certa avversione’ for the subject, because Arici ‘era una gentiliana, una crociana, riteneva che le scienze naturali e la fisica e la matematica fossero materie accessorie, ausiliarie, di serie B’ (OC III, 1027). Levi elsewhere referred to those who upheld this Crocean anti-science bias in the Italian school system as ‘la congiura’, summarising the message they transmitted to him in particularly resonant terms: ‘Tu giovane fascista, tu giovane crociano, tu giovane cresciuto in questa Italia non avvicinarti alle fonti del sapere scientifico, perché sono pericolose’ (OC III, 484). Levi thus blamed Croce for what he called the ‘hegemony’ of humanistic culture in Italy (OC III, 255) and the resulting diminishment of science - and the dearth of science fiction writing - in the Italian cultural scene (OC III, 51). Moreover, he framed his own penchant for the sciences in explicitly anti-Crocean terms. In the ‘Idrogeno’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, he contrasts his youthful passion for chemistry with his humanistic schooling, absorbed by ‘metamorfosi inconcludenti, da Platone ad Agostino, da Agostino a Tommaso, da Tommaso a Hegel, da Hegel a Croce’ (OC I, 876).

As for the potentially positive influence of Croce’s persistent anti-Fascism on Levi’s fledgling resistance to Mussolini’s regime, the evidence is mixed. In the ‘Potassio’ chapter of Il sistema periodico, Levi recounts how his generation had to ‘«inventare» un nostro antifascismo, crearlo dal germe, dalle radici. Cercavamo intorno a noi, e imboccavamo strade che portavano poco lontano. La Bibbia, Croce, la geometria, la fisica, ci apparivano fonti di certezza’ (OC I, 898). However, in a 1976 interview he recalled instead the ‘confusion’ of the interwar period, when countervailing voices were scarce: ‘Di antifascismo si aveva paura a parlare; Marx non esisteva e Croce veniva censurato’ (OC III, 916). To what degree Levi found political inspiration in Croce in addition to the frustration he faced as a result of Croce’s humanistic prejudices thus remains in doubt.

What we can say with greater confidence is that the so-called ‘congiura’ that determined much of Levi’s schooling ensured that his reading of Dante was thoroughly Crocean. Indeed, scholars have demonstrated that the textbooks with which Primo Levi was taught his Dante emphasised Benedetto Croce’s analysis of the Commedia, based firmly on Francesco De Sanctis’s hegemonic nineteenth-century Storia della letteratura italiana (Pertile 2010, 30; Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 82). As he elaborated in the 1921 study La poesia di Dante, Benedetto Croce was largely uninterested in what he dismissed as the ‘bizzarre interpretazioni’ of the scholarly dantisti who dominated the academic interpretation of the Commedia, and who seized upon what he believed to be pointless questions of Medieval theology (Croce 1921, 25, 63, 197). Instead, and as a result of his aesthetic theory, Croce was interested exclusively in Dante’s poetic ‘intuizione lirica’ (31). This emphasis manifests itself in Croce’s famous distinction between the Commedia’s struttura, its historical and theological content, and its poesia, its inspired lyrical beauty (61-71). While questions of theology may have mattered to Dante, argued Croce, they need not trouble modern readers, who should treat them ‘con qualche indifferenza bensì, ma senza avversione e, soprattutto, senza irrisioni’ (204). The indifference to Dante’s religious beliefs allowed Croce to redeem in poetic terms many of those Dante had damned in theological terms.

This emphasis is evident in Croce’s analysis of the figure of Ulysses. Quoting the same lines that Levi would recite to Jean - ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti | Ma per seguir virtude e conoscenza’ - Croce argues that Ulysses emerges as a positive figure despite Dante’s intentions. Ulysses, Croce insists,

è una parte di Dante stesso, cioè delle profonde aspirazioni che la riverenza religiosa e l’umiltà cristiana potevano in lui contenere, ma non già distruggere. Donde la figura di questo Ulisse dantesco, peccaminoso ma di sublime peccato, eroe tragico, maggiore forse di quel che fu mai nell’epos e nella tragedia greca (97-98).

Whether directly or, what is more likely, indirectly, this analysis may well have influenced Primo Levi’s reading of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

Yet Levi goes further than Croce. With his ‘intuizione di un attimo’, Levi fixates not upon Dante’s fourteenth-century poetic intuition but instead upon his own admittedly ‘anachronistic’ discovery of the poem’s relevance to him and to Jean, ‘che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. With this intuition, Levi transcends the scholastic Dante drilled into him by the ‘congiura’ and discovers verses far more vital than those he had studied in school.

CLL