Hegel, an intellectual biography

Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.

Due to his ideological choices, Papini’s work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an “undeservedly forgotten” author.

In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli (“Twenty four brains”), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, finally, himself!

«The two great merits of Hegel, according to his latest champion, are these: that he demonstrated the existence of a method peculiar to philosophy and different from the methods of art or the physical and mathematical sciences; and that he formulated that dialectic (the co-existence of contraries or the identity of opposites) which was already implicit in certain earlier philosophers, and was indeed foretokened in a general way by the whole course of philosophy. Philosophy, then, differs from all other products of the human mind in that it concerns itself with concepts which are universal and concrete, unlike the intuitions of art, the ecstasies of mysticism, or the representative generalities of science».