Abstract

To understand in what sense Massimo Cacciari defines «concrete» the metaphysics to which he refers, it is worth recalling The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky, written in 1936 by Alexandre Kojève, the philosopher famous for his lectures on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études that became legendary both for their audience (Lacan, Queneau, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Breton, Caillois) and for the profound influence they subsequently exerted on philosophical reflection. In one of his most fruitful phases of thought, Kojève tackled the subject of art in general and what he considered to be one of its most mature manifestations – the art of his uncle Vasily Kandinsky – recontextualised in an entirely original painting, approved by the painter himself, who had moreover been its direct client. It is no coincidence that Kandinsky re-appropriated the term «concrete» to qualify his work (Konkrete Kunst, 1938). To summarise, according to Kojève’s argument, representational painting is abstract, in that beauty is extracted, abstracted from reality, and subjective, because this operation requires the active participation of the artist, the elaboration of his impressions. In contrast, non-representational painting is concrete, in that it is created directly by the artist, as an object that does not exist in external reality, and objective, in that the painting is a creation independent of the creator, the creating subject. According to Kojève, Kandinsky creates his paintings just as one living being generates another: his non-representational painting ultimately allows us to experience something that is only «painting», as if this were the most proper result of the progressive reduction of subjectivism and abstraction (in the sense he defined it). In this meaning, the «concreteness» we speak of is a claim to the autonomy of what it refers to: painting in the case of Kandinsky, philosophy in that of Cacciari, who takes up and makes his own the idea expressed by Pavel Florensky in The Royal Doors of Icon Painting as a metaphysics of being – a metaphysics that is not abstract, but concrete. The difference from Kandinsky is that for Florensky concreteness means autonomy, certainly, but not self-sufficiency. Controversial precisely with his then colleague at the Polygraphic Faculty of the VChUTEMAS in Moscow (a higher institute for industrial design), he in fact asserts the need that art, while in no way having to represent reality, must nevertheless relate to it in order to increase understanding and make it grow. As icons are able to do, capable of combining the actuality of everyday experience with the strategy of a gaze turned towards the incarnate sky, in order to savour the spirituality that life is woven with and to find the constant presence of the invisible in it. This is the concrete for Florensky, this is the sense in which he understands metaphysics. On the strength of this conception of concreteness Cacciari in this work offers us a history of Logos, which – he emphasises – «should not be translated only with ratio, from reor, ratus sum, which indicates precisely counting, calculating. Logos comprises ratio in itself, it is not reduced to it. Logos connects in itself ratio (and oratio) and the Impossible (which one must also try to represent), it “symbolizesµ the dimension proper to ratio with that which within the limits of language is only indictable, imaginable, precisely approximable». Massimo Cacciari’s Metafisica Concreta is above all this: the result of exemplary research, which recovers the centrality of a philosophical space understood not in a subordinate sense to other disciplines, so as to reaffirm its centrality both in life and among knowledge, but nevertheless not closed in an impracticable claim of self-sufficiency and oriented, on the contrary, constantly to constructive and fruitful dialogue with each of them, if it is found to be actually available.