ATTUALISMO. – This is the form of idealism (v.) proposed by Giovanni Gentile, and the one that has spread more widely in Italy than the other forms. It is, first and foremost, an idealism, and derives from Hegel through the intermediary of Bertrando Spaventa and Jaja. Every reality is reduced to thought; the object of which realists speak, in agreement with common sense, is a creation of the subject, which is nothing outside the act in which it is known. That which would lie beyond thought, transcending it, cannot exist, nor even be thought.
It is not, however, easy to construct a system in which the idealist requirements are fully satisfied. Actualism accuses its predecessors of having retained some remnant of transcendence, and claims to have freed itself from it entirely. It suppresses that duality which in Hegelianism still seems to exist between nature and spirit, between facts and the idea; it renounces the deduction of the real from the necessity of thought, since deduction implies dualism and transcendence; and thus arrives at a conception that is at once a monism, a phenomenalism, and an uncompromising mobilism. Outside this worldly reality in which we live, outside our universe and its development, there is nothing. The Ego does not transcend itself. In the reality that constitutes the universe there is no substance, no faculty, but only the act in actuality; and this act in actuality is not the Aristotelian act, completed perfection, the terminus of movement: it is movement in the process of becoming, that is, the becoming of thought, without pause, without any extrinsic law, which continually creates its own life by 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 objectify itself. The creation of the spirit is always unforeseeable novelty. The spirit is identified with life and with history. Events are the activity of the spirit; in them is expressed the process of the conceptions that the spirit forms of itself, creating philosophy, and from this follows the identification of philosophy and history.
Gentile’s actualism must be credited with a powerful organizing inspiration, nourished by a penetrating knowledge of the history of thought, and considerably superior to that of the positivist systems. It is nevertheless clear that it is not only incompatible with the Christian faith because of its fundamental and continual denials of a transcendent God and of the substantiality of individual souls, but also because, in addition to the difficulties inherent in every immanentist idealism, it introduces some further difficulties of its own, which are extremely serious. If reality is nothing other than a pure becoming of the spirit, everything that occurs, whether in the realm of thought or of action, is thereby justified: or rather, the concepts of truth, justice, and beauty lose all content, since there is no longer any rule by which to measure them, nor any absolute on which to ground them. V. GENTILI, GIOVANNI.
La filosofia di Gentile, Milan 1922; V. L'AIA, L'idealismo attuale di G. Gentile, Trani 1925; A. Zacchi, Il nuovo idealismo, Rome 1925; G. Busnelli, I fondamenti dell'idealismo attuale, there 1926; C. Boyer, Note sur l'idealisme de M. G. Gentile, in Archives de philosophie, 9 (1932, II); id., Il concetto di storia nell'idealismo e nel tomismo, Rome 1935; T. Bartolomei, Idealismo e realismo, 2 vols., Turin–Rome 1937. Carlo Boyer
THE AUTHOR IN ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY. — The term a., applied to the philosophical movement centered on the thought of G. Gentile, signifies the developments, elaborations, and transpositions made by its followers or epigones. Up to now, there have been and still are three principal orientations within a.: a) the defense, in its integrity, of the speculative import of the act in its twofold meaning, epistemological (Kantian) as transcendental apperception and metaphysical (Hegelian) as the unity of the real, identified (immanentistically) with God; b) the elaboration of those transcendentalist elements that a. is unable to resolve in the immanence of the act of thinking, to the point of considering immanence a transitory moment and transforming a. itself into a transcendent or realistic idealism, decisively theistic in the Christian-Catholic sense; c) the elaboration of the act in its purely epistemological or empirical meaning, with the exclusion of its metaphysical sense. The first orientation has remained a school position without further development; the second can no longer be called a. and today constitutes the autonomous movement of “Christian spiritualism” (Carlini, Guzzo, Sciacca, La Via, etc.); the third may be regarded as the dissolution of Gentilian a., which, through criticism of what it contains of metaphysical, abstractistic, and panlogistic elements, has been deprived of the principle of self-consciousness or of the transcendental subject and driven toward empiricist, pragmatist, skeptical, irrationalist, and other positions. Here we shall limit ourselves to discussing only the first and third tendencies (commonly designated by the name “Gentilian left”), leaving aside the second (improperly called the “Gentilian right”), which is treated under the corresponding headword. We shall also discuss other idealists who, within a., by which they are influenced, assert other requirements.
More than anyone else, Vito Fazio Allmayer (born in Palermo on 21 November 1885 and professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of that city) remained faithful to Gentilian a. Given that the absolute subject produces empirical subjects and resolves them in its act, he identifies morality, which is action, with the perpetual resolution of the constituted self in an act that surpasses it, in “that act which constitutes the eternal human personality, in which we, by annihilating ourselves, live: since it lives in us.” To respect ourselves and others means to respect the absolute self. Religion is resolved in the act thus conceived, understood not as the worship of the absolute that is wholly realized, but of the ethical absolute in fieri. “Every true religion will therefore be resolved in the moral life, which embraces within itself not only what is commonly called practice, but also what is called science; and a religion that cannot be resolved in 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, still less the God of religion; and that the reduction of religion to morality, common to many forms of immanentism, is unfounded and arbitrary. Following the canons of idealist historiography (the dialectical method), Fazio also wrote, among other works, three historical studies: G. Galilei (Palermo 1914); La teoria della libertà nella filosofia di Hegel (Messina 1918); Saggio su F. Bacone (Palermo 1928).
Unlike Fazio Allmayer, who consistently reduces empirical subjects—and thereby denies their reality—to transitory moments in the process of the single impersonal activity of the absolute subject, Giuseppe Saitta (born in Gagliano Castelferrato on 7 November 1881, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Bologna) asserts the reality of the empirical and the individual. His dominant concern remains the relationship between religion and philosophy and the reduction of the latter to ethicality. Not duality but the “co-presentiality” of the “many” and the “one,” of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”: one must grasp “the presentiality of self-consciousness in every tremor of our being” (Lo spirito come eticità, Bologna 1921, p. 23), the eternal in the transitory. Matter, which constitutes externality, “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 distinct from its determinations; not the Gentilian dramatism “of a double self, the empirical self and the pure self, but the dramatism of the single self,” in which the universal is resolved in the “personality of the spirit, as absolute individuation or living being” (ibid., p. 66). And this is what Saitta calls “spiritual synthetism”: the unity of sensation and intellect, of knowing and willing, of body and spirit, “becoming as freedom,” which is the creation of ends, the mediation of being with what ought to be, the synthesis of felicità and dovere, the absolute ethicality of the spirit. Once the transcendental self is resolved into the infinite plurality of subjects, into the concrete world of individuals, Saitta is led to assert the value of feeling, sensation, and the bodily, arriving at “the boldest and most revolutionary subjectivism,” which he identifies with “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 culminates in the revaluation of nominalism and the denial of all political and religious institutions, “true and proper congelations of the human spirit” (La personalità umana, etc., pp. 130, 135, 138). Hence his violent and vulgar polemic against religion (especially the Catholic religion), which, according to him, denies human dignity and the human person, “the philosophy of death” (ibid., p. 22), “unalloyed materialism” (p. 32), etc. Not the transcendent God (which leads to “ethical nihilism” [p. 49] and “slave morality”), but the “living God,” who is identified with human personality itself, the “modern God,” which is the very deification of man (ibid., pp. 20, 21). With Saitta, the attempt to eliminate every metaphysical and transcendent residue from the Gentilian system thus flows (inevitably) into atheistic materialism. From an actualist standpoint, 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 utter incomprehension, he reduces Thomism in its entirety to theocracy and papism.
Another attempt (of greater speculative refinement) to deepen a. critically is represented by Ugo Spirito (born in Arezzo on 6 September 1896, professor of philosophy at the University of Rome), initially an apologist for a. itself and also a respected 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 per-
He therefore identifies the act with its modes, with concrete experience, and philosophy with the particular sciences: in history philosophy finds its true expression (Scienza e filosofia, Florence 1933). Philosophy is not a science in its own right, 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 concerning reality is at once particular and universal, every form of knowledge at once scientific and philosophical: not two forms of knowledge, but two necessary moments of every form of knowledge. Thus a. approaches the Crocean conception of philosophy as a “mundane,” non-theologizing science. Subsequently Spirito (La vita come ricerca, Florence 1937; La vita come arte, there 1941; Il problematicismo, there 1948) developed, still within a., that position of thought which has by now become characteristic of him, problematicism: that is, given that “antinomy” constitutes the essence of thought, every solution is illusory, and nothing remains but 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 regarded dialectic as a solution. Hence dialectic has become a “myth,” as a. and historicism are “myths,” as is every philosophical position that presents itself as a solution. It is true that either the metaphysical system is attained or there is no philosophy, since “search” is not philosophy but only the desire or need for 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 a 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 therefore the necessity of theological transcendence (“the present necessity”: La vita come ricerca, p. 34), which, however, he himself regards as “mythical.” But this is a gratuitous assertion, a “dogmatic” stopping 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 (born in Rome on 4 December 1904, professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Pisa) wishes to eliminate the intellectualist 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, knowing, and dialectic are the very act of the “considering consciousness” and never a “considered fact”; consequently every logic and every epistemology is impossible. The rules of logic and the principles of epistemology refer not to knowing but to praxis: “the logos has no laws apart from that of its absolute superiority to every law; and if, therefore, those that have been conceived 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 self lies in self-consciousness as will or pure ethicality (ibid., p. 38). There is no theoretical philosophy, but only a philosophy of practice: “absolute moralism”
(founded on pure moral faith), or also “absolute pedagogism,” insofar as morality and pedagogy are moments of a single act: “the pedagogical requirement which, after making the self set its own limit in the thou (morality), makes the thou set its limit in the him (education),” as is stated 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 latest publications Estetica Semantica Istorica (there 1947), Logica Guoseologia Metafisica (there 1948). Calogero also wrote noteworthy works (although debatable) on logic in Greek thought (for him, the history of logic is identical with that of its “dissolution”): I fondamenti della logica aristotelica (Florence 1927), Studi sull’eleatismo (Rome 1932), I primordi della logica antica (there 1936), etc.
A strong ethical as well as aesthetic demand motivates the thought of Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz (born in Naples on 18 February 1888, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Florence), a dissatisfied adherent of a., which, as he says, left its followers “empty-handed.” Now it is precisely the ethical demand that a. fails to satisfy, insofar as it does not posit the antithesis of being and what ought to be, of the real and the ideal. Our life is a perpetual striving toward the coincidence of doing and knowing, and “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 what ought to be that must become being” (Il mio moralismo, in the volume 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 demand is extremely vivid in the thought of Gaetano Chiavacci (born on 19 June 1886, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Florence), influenced, more than that of Arangio Ruiz, by the thinker from Gorizia C. Michelstaedter. According to Chiavacci, Gentile’s act may be considered either as act, in its inwardness, or as actuality or principle that posits the existence of everything else. As actuality it is “the illusory affirmation of life in that present which lies between past and future,” whereas as act it “is the real affirmation of that present which lies outside time” (Illusione e realtà, Florence 1932, p. 219): existence belongs to actuality, reality to act; the former is “illusion,” the latter “persuasion,” or reality. Between these two poles unfolds the drama of man, who yearns to overcome the finite spatiotemporal multiplicity and to attain unity of self in a present where time does not count. In this yearning one acquires awareness of the nothingness of the world, a nothingness that is suffering, but is also man’s catharsis, since through awareness of the nothingness of things he 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 world 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: “he who succeeds in truly devaluing life finally understands this paradoxical truth: that life is worth enduring, if one thereby comes to devalue it.” Every support must be rejected, including that of God (Chiavacci rejects the theistic solution): spiritual life, which in its development continually conforms to itself, is the realization of God in us, the conquest of the Absolute, both as victory over our particular self (illusion) and as the perpetual discovery of God in our consciousness (reality) (Saggio della natura dell’uomo, Florence 1936; La ragion poetica, there 1948). To “detach oneself” from things is to grasp them in their eternal being. Wisdom of a Spinozist and Schopenhauerian type, and therefore wisdom of despair, useless heroism. The inwardness, or act of spirituality, of which Chiavacci speaks, once the world is illusion and transcendence (God) is denied, is nothing but an empty inwardness, which vainly seeks to fill itself with an immense silence and a solemn peace. Of the actualists considered here, however, Chiavacci is the most thoughtful and profound.
Opposing requirements seek to assert themselves within a. Franco Lombardi (born in Naples on 28 June 1906, professor at the University of Rome) and Galvano Della Volpe (born in Imola on 24 Sept. 1895, professor at the University of Messina), namely, the concrete human and historical reality. For the former, the requirement (proper to idealism from Kant to Gentile) of understanding within the universality of the idea the “process of history that is realized here, on earth, among men” is not satisfied, insofar 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 individual 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, claims a philosophy of “individuality” or “singularity,” which he now identifies with Marxist critical-historical materialism, the enemy of every form of Platonism, interiorism, and Christianity (Critica dei principi logici, Messina 1942; Discorso sull’ineguaglianza, Rome 1943; La filosofia dell’esperienza di D. Hume, Florence 1933–35).
By contrast, Santino Caramella (born 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 original Croceanism (Religione, Teosofia, Filosofia, Bari 1931; Senso comune, teoria e pratica, ibid. 1933), he has now arrived at his own “critical spiritualism,” by this time decisively moving toward theological transcendence (Ideologia, Catania 1942; Metalogica, ibid. 1945).
De Ruggiero (v.), who in his later thought moved away from a., other actualists, too, have made notable contributions to the history of philosophy, political thought, and so forth. Studies in the philosophy of law were also influenced by a. (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 (born in Catania on 28 June 1875 and died in Rome in 1938, where he taught at the University for many years), as was Ernesto Codignola (born 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, a. made an effective contribution to renewing the whole of Italian culture in our century, but it is now in marked decline. With the so-called left-wing actualists, having lost its metaphysical soul, it has become skepticism, materialism, or an insubstantial moralism. The concepts of reality as spirit and of the interiority of truth to the spirit nevertheless remain, but they must be recovered on the ground of theological transcendence, where alone both spirit and authentic interiority have meaning.
The actualist hypothesis, fraught with negative consequences for the universal and spiritual values of human life, displays an incurable internal weakness because of its inability to provide an adequate theoretical-genetic interpretation of psychic acts, particularly acts of a spiritual order, and to establish philosophically the reality and unity of the human person. (v. ANIMA; PSICOLOGIA).