Antonio Aliotta

Antonio Aliotta (1881 – 1964) was an Italian philosopher and university professor.

Quotes

After criticising Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel so much for establishing a system of categories that predetermined the path that spiritual development had to follow, the neo-Hegelians of Italy were unable to do anything other than replace it with a more restricted set of categories from which we cannot escape. What a beautiful story, deluding itself that it is walking when in reality it is always standing still in the small circle of those few forms, marking its steps in a monotonous rhythm! But life has little respect for these a priori assumptions; it teaches us that spiritual categories, no less than the physical-mathematical categories of space, time, cause and quantity, are schemes that we construct to coordinate our experiences, and that they have nothing fixed, nothing necessary or eternal that can be deduced a priori.

From “Inesistenza di forme eterne dello spirito” (The Non-Existence of Eternal Forms of the Spirit), in Adriano Tilgher, “Antologia dei filosofi italiani del dopoguerra” (Anthology of Post-War Italian Philosophers), Guanda Editore, 1937², pp. 21-22.

The truth is not something ready-made outside of us, which we should merely reproduce, as the old empiricism believed; but it is an ever-new product of our cognitive activity that elevates the world of experience to a higher form of life. It is commonly said that in the search for truth we must strive to reflect objective reality; but this is an absurd claim, because no one can ever step outside of experience to compare their ideas with so-called things in themselves.

From “'L'esperimento storico delle filosofie”' (The Historical Experiment of Philosophies), in Adriano Tilgher, “'Antologia dei filosofi italiani del dopoguerra”' (Anthology of Post-War Italian Philosophers), Guanda Editore, 1937², p. 25.

Any truth is not universal in the intellectual sense that it is thought identically by everyone, but only insofar as there is a practical agreement based on certain explicitly formulated or implied conventions.

From Critica del'esistenzialismo (“'Critique of Existentialism”'), Perrella, 1951.

L'ispirazione kantiana nell'estetica di Federico Schiller

Antonio Aliotta, L'ispirazione kantiana nell'estetica di Federico Schiller in Logos, Rivista trimestrale, S.A. Editrice Perrella, Roma 1940

Incipit

“'The attempt to overcome Kantian dualism”' – Kant's Critique of Judgment had attempted in vain to overcome the dualism of the first two Critiques, using the idea of finality to bridge the gap between phenomenon and noumenon, between the world of necessity and that of freedom. The two worlds ultimately remained superimposed and only superficially connected, in that the order of natural phenomena in the complexity of its laws asserted itself, albeit only for the regulative use of the ideas of our reason, preformed in such a way as to make the realisation of moral consciousness possible. A true pre-established harmony with an artificial “'Deus ex machina”'.

Quotes

Friedrich Schiller, accepting Kant's legacy of the intelligible self and the sensible self, distinguishes two aspects that we can only divide abstractly in human beings and on which our analysis must stop: the person, who remains constant, and his or her changing states. (from “'Logos”', II fascicle p. 110)
In Kant's troubled criticism, there is all the torment of Christianity; in his theory of radical evil, the dogma of original sin persists, however philosophically transfigured. Schiller rightly wrote to Goethe: “There is always something in Kant, as in Luther, that reminds us of the monk who, even after leaving the cloister, cannot erase its traces from himself.” (from “'Logos”', II issue, p. 113)
Human perfection is not beyond the sensible world, but in the harmonious development of all human faculties in their integral certainty. from “'Logos”', II fascicle p. 113)
[...] for Schiller, art is the culmination of the life of the spirit and rational ethical conscience is only one aspect of it, having to integrate with sensitivity. Schiller, like Kant, maintains that moral action must be motivated not by sensory impulses but by reason. (from “'Logos”', II fascicle p. 115)
The first seed of Schiller's theory of art as free play is found in Kant. [...] Schiller draws from Kant his fundamental motive for play as a free activity, that is, without constraint, without the serious purpose of satisfying a sensible need, of constructing objective knowledge or of achieving a moral end.

For Schiller, freedom means precisely the absence of constraint, not only physical but also moral; because even duty constrains us painfully when it conflicts with sensible impulse, as in Kantian rigorism. Aesthetic freedom for Schiller is something more than moral freedom: the latter would indeed be a liberation from sensible impulses, but it would place us under the rule of a law imposed on our human nature. Aesthetic freedom also frees us from the suffering of this constraint, making us feel that ethical law is in accordance with our natural inclination.

According to Schiller, in the aesthetic attitude, the soul asserts itself as superior to all its current determinations; that is, it does not feel closed, dominated by any of them, capable of determining itself in infinite ways.

External links

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