Chapter 17 - Benedetto Croce and Adriano Tilgher

Summary

Luigi Pirandello engaged in a “battle of ideas” with two key figures of early twentieth-century Italian philosophical culture, Benedetto Croce and Adriano Tilgher. Pirandello criticized Croce’s separation of art and science, arguing that they form an interconnected unity. He also criticized Croce’s aesthetics and the separation of intuition from thought, which for Pirandello were both essential to the making of any work of art. Consequently, Croce provided disparaging remarks on Pirandello’s theatre that became very influential among contemporary literary critics. In contrast, Tilgher was one of the first critics to analyze Pirandello’s work with hermeneutical attention and is credited with creating the term pirandellismo. Influenced by Simmel and Bergson, and rejecting all types of metaphysics, Tilgher defended the autonomy of art while also acknowledging its capacity to interpret and reflect cultural contexts. However, Tilgher gradually took a critical stance in respect to Pirandello, both for political reasons and for a controversy over the famous “life/form” critical formulation, which Tilgher claimed as his own invention, while evidence shows that it was extrapolated from Pirandello’s writing.