Actualism

ACTUALISM. - It is the form of idealism (v.) that Giovanni Gentile proposed and that, more than the other forms, spread in Italy. It is first of all an idealism and derives from Hegel through the intermediary of Bertrando Spaventa and of Jaja. Every reality is reduced to thought; the object of which the realists speak, in agreement with common sense, is a creation of the subject, which is nothing outside the act in which it is known. What would be beyond thought, transcendent to it, cannot exist, nor even be thought.

It is not easy, however, to construct a system in which idealistic demands are fully satisfied. A. accuses his predecessors of having preserved some remnant of transcendence, and claims to have freed himself from it entirely. It suppresses that duality which in Hegelianism seems still to exist between nature and spirit, between facts and the idea; it renounces deducing the real from the necessity of thought, since deduction implies dualism and transcendence; and thus it arrives at a conception that is at once a monism, a phenomenism, an intransigent mobilism. Outside this worldly reality that we live, outside our universe and its development, there is nothing. The I does not transcend itself. In the reality that constitutes the universe there is no substance, there is no faculty, but only the act in act; and this act in act is not the Aristotelian act, completed perfection, term of movement: it is movement in its making, that is, the becoming of thought, without rest, without extrinsic law, which continually creates its own life, creating its objects. The pure act is pure becoming. The spirit is not a substance, which would be an object, whereas it is subject and cannot be objectified. The creation of the spirit is always unforeseeable novelty. The spirit identifies itself with life and with history. Events are the activity of the spirit; in it is expressed the process of the conceptions that the spirit forms of itself, creating philosophy, and from this derives the identification of philosophy and history.

To the Gentilian a. one must acknowledge a powerful organizing inspiration, nourished by a penetrating knowledge of the history of thought, and far higher than that of the positivist systems. It is manifest, however, that not only is it incompatible with the Christian faith, because of its fundamental and continuous negations of a transcendent God and of the substantiality of individual souls, but also because, to the difficulties inherent in every immanentist idealism, it adds some of its own, quite grave. If reality is nothing other than a pure becoming of the spirit, everything that happens, in the field of thought or of action, is for that very reason justified: or rather the concepts of truth, of the just, of the beautiful lose every content, since there no longer exists a rule that measures them, nor an absolute that grounds them. v. GENTILE, GIOVANNI.

Carlo Boyer

THE ACTUALISM IN ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY

The term a. referred to the philosophical current that centers on the thought of G. Gentile is meant to signify the developments, the deepenings, the transpositions of his followers or epigones. Three have been and are, up to now, the principal orientations of a.: a) defense, in its integrity, of the speculative scope of the act in its twofold meaning, gnoseological (Kantian) of transcendental apperception and metaphysical (Hegelian) of the unity of the real, identified (immanentistically) with God; b) elaboration of those transcendentalist elements that a. fails to resolve in the immanence of the act of thinking, to the point of considering immanence as a transitory moment and of transforming a. itself into a transcendent or realistic idealism, decisively theistic in the Christian-Catholic sense; c) elaboration of the act in its pure meaning, whether gnoseological or empirical, with the exclusion of its metaphysical sense. The first orientation has remained a school position without developments; the second can no longer be called a. and today constitutes the autonomous current of "Christian spiritualism" (Carlini, Guzzo, Sciacca, La Via, etc.); the third can be considered the dissolution of Gentilian a. which, through the criticism of all that is metaphysical, abstractistic and panlogistic in it, has been mutilated of the principle of self-consciousness or of the transcendental subject and driven toward empiricist, pragmatist, skeptical, irrationalist positions, etc. Here we limit ourselves to speaking only of the first and the third tendency (commonly designated by the name "Gentilian left"), leaving aside the second (improperly called "Gentilian right"), which is treated under the corresponding heading. We shall also treat of other idealists who, within a., by which they are influenced, assert other demands.

More than anyone else, Vito Fazio Allmayer (b. at Palermo on 21 Nov. 1885 and professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of that same city) remained faithful to Gentilian a.; he, having posited that the absolute subject produces empirical subjects and resolves them in its act, identifies morality, which is action, with the perpetual resolving of the constituted I into an act that surpasses it, into "that act which constitutes the eternal human personality, in which we, annihilating ourselves, live: for it lives in us." To respect ourselves and others means to respect the absolute I. In the act thus conceived, religion is resolved, understood not as adoration of the absolute wholly realized, but of the ethical absolute in fieri. "Every true religion will therefore be resolved into the moral life, which embraces in itself not only what is commonly called practice, but also what is called science; and a religion that cannot be resolved into the moral life will be either false or vain" (Il problema morale come problema della costituzione del soggetto ed altri saggi, Florence 1942, p. 273). It is easy to observe that a God in fieri is no longer God, nor much less the God of religion; and that the reduction, common to many forms of immanentism, of religion to morality is groundless and arbitrary. Fazio, according to the canons of idealist historiography (dialectical method), wrote, among other things, three works of a historical character: G. Galilei (Palermo 1914); La teoria della libertà nella filosofia di Hegel (Messina 1918); Saggio su F. Bacone (Palermo 1928).

Unlike Fazio Allmayer, who coherently reduces (and thereby denies the reality of) empirical subjects to transitory moments of the process of the single impersonal activity of the absolute subject, Giuseppe Saitta (b. at Gagliano Castelferrato on 7 Nov. 1881, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Bologna) vindicates the reality of the empirical and of the individual; his dominant problem remains that of the relations between religion and philosophy and the reduction of the latter to ethicality. Not duality but "co-presentiality" of the "many" and the "one," of "consciousness" and "self-consciousness": one must grasp "the presentiality of self-consciousness in every thrill of our being" (Lo spirito come eticità, Bologna 1921, p. 23), the eternal in the transitory. Matter, constituting exteriority, "is what makes self-consciousness itself real" (ibid., p. 34). Not the Hegelian dialectic of pure thought but the dialectic of the determinate, in which the absolute Idea is not distinguished from its determinations; not the Gentilian dramatism "of a double I, the empirical I and the pure I, but the dramatism of the single I," in which the universal is resolved into the "personality of the spirit, as absolute individuation or living being" (ibid., p. 66). And this is what Saitta calls "spiritual syntheticism": unity of sensation and intellect, of knowing and willing, of body and spirit, "becoming as freedom," which is creation of ends, mediation of being with ought-to-be, synthesis of happiness and duty, absolute ethicality of the spirit. Having resolved the transcendental I into the infinite plurality of subjects, into the concrete world of individuals, Saitta is led to vindicate the value of feeling, of sensation, of the corporeal, arriving at the "most audacious and revolutionary subjectivism," which he identifies with the "Enlightenment consciousness" (La personalità umana e la nuova coscienza illuministica, Genoa 1938; L'illuminismo nella sofistica greca, Milan 1938; La libertà umana e l'esistenza, Florence 1940) and which issues in the revaluation of nominalism and in the negation of all political and religious institutions, "veritable congealings of the human spirit" (La personalità umana, etc., pp. 130, 135, 138). Hence the violent and vulgar polemic against religion (especially the Catholic), which, according to him, denies human dignity and the human person, a "philosophy of death" (ibid., p. 22), "downright materialism" (p. 32), etc. Not the transcendent God (who leads to "ethical nihilism" [p. 49] and to a "slavish morality"), but the "living God" who identifies himself with the human personality itself, the "modern God," who is the very divinization of man (ibid., pp. 20, 21). With Saitta the attempt to eliminate from the Gentilian system every residue of metaphysics and of transcendence thus (inevitably) issues in atheistic materialism. From an actualist point of view Saitta wrote several historical works (always in a polemical and therefore uncritical tone), such as Il pensiero di V. Gioberti (Messina 1917, 2nd ed. Florence 1928); La filosofia di M. Ficino (Messina 1923, 2nd ed. Florence 1943), Il carattere della filosofia tomistica (Florence 1924), in which, with absolute incomprehension, he reduces all Thomism to theocracy and papism.

Another attempt (of greater speculative refinement) at a critical deepening of a. is represented by Ugo Spirito (b. at Arezzo on 6 Sept. 1896, professor of philosophy at the University of Rome), at first an apologist of a. itself and also an esteemed scholar of law and economics. Spirito too sees in the Gentilian act of thinking as absolute unity a theological residue of traditional metaphysics and, as a consequence, a permanence of the dualisms of transcendental I and empirical I, of Act and its modes, etc. He therefore identifies the act with its modes, with concrete experience, philosophy with the particular sciences: in history philosophy finds its true expression (Scienza e filosofia, Florence 1933). Philosophy is not a science unto itself, the science of the "mythological" concept of God, object of the old abstract philosophy, but identifies itself with the various concrete forms of the activity of the spirit (politics, law, art, etc.). Every judgment about reality is at once particular and universal, every cognition at once scientific and philosophical: not two forms of knowledge, but two necessary moments of every knowledge. Thus a. draws close to the Crocean sense of philosophy as a "worldly," non-theologizing science. Subsequently Spirito (La vita come ricerca, Florence 1937; La vita come arte, ibid. 1941; Il problematicismo, ibid. 1948) elaborated, always within a., that position of thought which is by now characteristic of him, problematicism: that is, given that "antinomy" constitutes the essence of thought, any solution is illusory and there remains only to live problematicity itself, the ever-open search, the ever-unresolved dilemma. Hegel had the merit of placing the essence of thought in its antinomic or dialectical process, but he considered dialectic as solution. Therefore dialectic has become "myth," as a. and historicism are "myths," "myth" every philosophical position that presents itself as solution. It is true that either one attains the metaphysical system or there is no philosophy, inasmuch as "search" is not philosophy but only desire or need of philosophy; but it is also true that self-possession is unattainable: either the search or the immediacy of life as art, which is not self-possession or metaphysical system. It should be noted that Spirito recognizes the radical insufficiency of every immanentist solution (notable is his critique of modern thought from Descartes to Gentile) and hence the necessity of theological transcendence ("l'attuale necessità": La vita come ricerca, p. 34), which however he considers itself "mythical." But this is a gratuitous assertion, a "dogmatic" halting at pure "problematicism," which ab intrinseco demands the metaphysical "solution." Not to recognize that problematicity essentially implies transcendence (not presupposed but demonstrated by problematicity itself) is a contradiction, from which Spirito will certainly have to emerge.

Guido Calogero too (b. in Rome on 4 Dec. 1904, professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Pisa) wishes to eliminate the intellectualistic residues found in Gentilian a., which had the merit of identifying reality with the act of thinking, with theorizing thought and not with theorized thought. But if this is so, one must renounce constructing a theory of the act of thought, a logic and an epistemology (La conclusione della filosofia del conoscere, Florence 1938). The logos, cognition, dialectic are the act itself of the "considering consciousness" and never a "considered fact"; hence every logic and every epistemology is impossible. The rules of logic and the principles of epistemology refer not to cognition but to praxis: "the logos has no laws other than that of its absolute superiority to every law; and if therefore those which have been thought as laws of the logos are real laws, this means that they are not laws of the logos, but laws of praxis" (ibid., pp. 126-28). The reality of the I is in self-consciousness as will or pure ethicality (ibid., p. 38). There is no theoretical philosophy, but only philosophy of practice: "absolute moralism"

(founded on pure moral faith) or also "absolute pedagogism," inasmuch as morality and pedagogy are moments of a single act: "the pedagogical exigency which, after having made the I posit its own limit in the thou (morality), makes the thou posit its limit in the he (education)," as one reads in La scuola dell'uomo (Florence 1939), where Calogero gives systematic form to his thought, restated in the volume Etica giuridica e politica (Turin 1946), and completed in the last publications Estetica Semantica Istorica (ibid. 1947), Logica Gnoseologia Metafisica (ibid. 1948). Calogero has also written notable works (though debatable) on logic in Greek thought (for him the history of logic identifies itself with that of its 'dissolution'): I fondamenti della logica aristotelica (Florence 1927), Studi sull'eleatismo (Rome 1932), I primordi della logica antica (ibid. 1936), etc.

A strong ethical exigency (as well as aesthetic) moves the thought of Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz (b. in Naples on 18 Feb. 1888, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Florence), one dissatisfied with a. which, as he says, has left its followers "with empty hands." Now it is precisely the ethical exigency that a. does not satisfy, inasmuch as it does not posit the antithesis of being and ought-to-be, of real and ideal. Our life is a perennial tending toward the coincidence of doing and knowing, and "the knowing that is not doing, the theoretical that is not practical, is the ideal that we ought, that we ourselves would wish, to make real; it is the ought-to-be that must make itself being" (Il mio moralismo, in the vol. Filosofi italiani contemporanei, Milan 1942, pp. 53-54. Cf. also Conoscenza e moralità, Città di Castello 1921; Arte e filosofia, Genoa 1935).

The same moral exigency is very much alive in the thought of Gaetano Chiavacci (b. 19 June 1886, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Florence), influenced, more than that of Arangio Ruiz, by the Gorizian thinker C. Michelstaedter. According to Chiavacci, Gentile's act can be considered either as act, in its interiority, or as actuality or principle that posits the existence of every other thing. As actuality it is "the illusory affirmation of life in that present which finds itself between past and future," while as act "it is the real affirmation of that present which is outside time" (Illusione e realtà, Florence 1932, p. 219): existence belongs to actuality, reality to the act; the first is "illusion," the second is "persuasion" or reality. Between these two poles unfolds the drama of man, who yearns to overcome the finite spatio-temporal manifold and to conquer the unity of himself in a present where time does not count. In this yearning one acquires consciousness of the nothingness of the world, a nothingness that is suffering, but is also the catharsis of man, who with the consciousness of the nothingness of things opens the way to the solution of the problem of himself and of things themselves. Spirituality cannot be lived outside the external world, but this must be lived with "disillusioned," "detached" eyes: to feel the world and the natural personality as not ours and at the same time to "accept" them: "whoever comes truly to devalue life, finally understands this paradoxical truth that it is worth lasting out life, if one thus comes to devalue it." One must reject every support, including that of God (Chiavacci rejects the theistic solution): the spiritual life, which in its development continually adapts itself to itself, is the realization of God in us, is the conquest of the Absolute, as victory over our particular I (illusion) and as perennial discovery of our consciousness of God (reality) (Saggio della natura dell'uomo, Florence 1936; La ragion poetica, ibid. 1948). To "detach oneself" from things is to grasp them in their eternal being. A wisdom of the Spinozian, Schopenhauerian type and therefore a wisdom of despair, useless heroism. The interiority or the act of spirituality, of which Chiavacci speaks, once the world is illusion and transcendence (God) is denied, is nothing but an empty interiority, which in vain seeks to fill itself with an immense silence and a solemn peace. Chiavacci, however, of the actualists considered here is the most thoughtful and profound.

Opposite demands seek to assert themselves within actualism: those of the concrete human and historical. Franco Lombardi (b. in Naples on 28 June 1906, professor at the University of Rome) and Galvano Della Volpe (b. in Imola on 24 Sept. 1895, professor at the University of Messina). For the former, the demand (proper to idealism from Kant to Gentile) to understand within the universality of the idea the «process of history that is realized here, on earth, among men» is not satisfied, inasmuch as there remains a residue of Platonism (an eternal and immutable truth), which must be overcome in a «humanistic philosophy» that posits the universality of man and absoluteness in history: a philosophy of the single subject and not of the universal subject (L'esperienza e l'uomo, Florence 1935; Il mondo degli uomini, ibid. 1935; La libertà del volere e l'individuo, Milan 1941). Della Volpe too asserts a philosophy of «individuality» or «singularity», which he now makes coincide with Marxist critical-historical materialism, the enemy of every form of Platonism, of interiorism, of Christianity (Critica dei principi logici, Messina 1942; Discorso sull'ineguaglianza, Rome 1943; La filosofia dell'esperienza di D. Hume, Florence 1933-35).

On the contrary, Santino Caramella (b. in Genoa on 22 June 1902, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Catania) has increasingly distanced himself from both actualist and historicist immanentism; from his early Croceanism (Religione, Teosofia, Filosofia, Bari 1931; Senso comune, teoria e pratica, ibid. 1933) he has now arrived at his own «critical spiritualism», by now decisively headed toward theological transcendence (Ideologia, Catania 1942; Metalogica, ibid. 1945).

Together with Guido De Ruggiero (v.), who in his last thought moved away from actualism, other actualists too have made notable contributions to the history of philosophy, of political thought, etc. Studies in the philosophy of law have also been influenced by actualism (M. Barillari, W. Cesarini Sforza, G. Maggiore, F. Battaglia, the last two by now Catholics), but above all pedagogy, both through the reform of 1923 and through Gentile's writings and countless other publications. An effective popularizer of actualist pedagogy was Giuseppe Lombardo Radice (b. in Catania on 28 June 1875 and d. in Rome in 1938, at whose university he taught for many years), as was also Ernesto Codignola (b. in Genoa on 23 June 1885 and professor at the University of Florence). They had the merit of freeing the Italian school from positivist and Herbartian methods and of founding pedagogy on philosophical bases. Undoubtedly actualism contributed effectively to renewing the whole of Italian culture in our century, but it is by now in clear decline. With the so-called left-wing actualists, having lost its metaphysical soul, it has become scepticism or materialism or an inconsistent moralism. There remain, however, the concepts of reality as spirit and of the interiority of truth to the spirit, but these must be recovered on the ground of theological transcendence, where alone both spirit and authentic interiority have meaning.

Michele Federico Sciacca

ACTUALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

In the psychological sense, A. designates the positivist theory that identifies the soul with the complex of psychic acts and phenomena, denying its substantiality. "There is nothing real in the ego except the flowing of its acts... A flux, a bundle of sensations and impulses, that is the spirit" (I. Taine, De l'intelligence, I, 10th ed., Paris 1907, preface, p. 7). In substantially identical forms, A. is professed, besides in classical empiricism and positivism (Hume, Ribot, James, Paulsen, etc.), by not a few cultivators of scientific psychology (Fechner, Titchener, particularly Wundt), who see in psychic life nothing but an emergent aspect of bio-physiological processes.

The actualist hypothesis, pregnant with negative consequences in relation to the universal and spiritual values of human life, presents an incurable internal weakness because of the incapacity in which it finds itself to give a sufficient theoretical-genetic interpretation of psychic acts, particularly of acts of a spiritual order, and to ground philosophically the reality and the unity of the human person. (V. ANIMA; PSICOLOGIA).

Ugo Viglino