Il flusso e il ghiaccio. Del pensiero binomiale nella cultura europea (1865-1923)

Between the last decades of the XIXth century and the first years of the XXth century, several European intellectuals active in different fields (literature, philosophy, sociology, literary critic, art history, etc.) develop a discourse based on rigid dichotomies (the most famous of which is the one regarding the concepts Kultur and Zivilisation) aimed at differentiating, on non dialectical principles, two cultural fields always in radical contrast. Although the same scheme is applied to very different intellectual grounds (the social conformations of 'community' and 'society' in Ferdinand Tönnies, the artistic expressions of Renaissance and Baroque in Heinrich Wölfflin, the concepts of 'soul' and 'form' in the young Lukács, or those of Reformation and Counterreformation in the fascist intellectual Curzio Malaparte, etc.) the features attributed to the respective elements of the dichotomies repeated across the different analyses. If one the two elements is related to the idea of Being and to the concepts of universality, firmness, rigidity, unity, etc., the second one refers to the particularity, the appearance, the disaggregation, the fluidity, etc. My article analyzes, following several examples, both the manifestation of this culture and the reasons behind its formation