ATTUALISMO

ACTUALISM.

Actualism is the form of idealism (v. IDEALISM) proposed by Giovanni Gentile and more widely diffused in Italy than other forms. It is, first and foremost, an idealism and derives from Hegel through the intermediary of Bertrando Spaventa and Jaja. All reality is reduced to thought; the object spoken of by realists 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 be beyond thought, transcendent to it, cannot exist, nor can it even be thought.

It is not, however, easy to construct a system in which idealistic demands are fully satisfied. Actualism accuses its predecessors of having retained some remnant of transcendence and claims to have freed itself entirely from II. It suppresses that duality which, in Hegelianism, still seems to exist between nature and spirit, between facts and idea; it renounces deducing the real from the necessity of thought, since deduction implies dualism and transcendence. Thus it arrives at a conception that is at once monism, phenomenism, and uncompromising mobilism. Outside this worldly reality that we live in, 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 act; and this act in act is not the Aristotelian act, a completed perfection, the term of movement: it is movement in the process of becoming, that is, the becoming of thought, ceaselessly, without extrinsic law, which continually creates its own life by creating its objects. The act is pure becoming. Spirit is not a substance, which would be an object, while it is subject and cannot be objectified. The creation of spirit is always unforeseeable revision. Spirit identifies with life and with history. Events are the activity of spirit; in it is expressed the process of the conceptions that spirit forms of itself, creating philosophy, and from this derives the identification of philosophy and history.

To Gentile’s actualism must be acknowledged a powerful organizing inspiration, nourished by a penetrating knowledge of the history of thought and far superior to the systems of positivism. It is manifest, however, that it is not only incompatible with Christian faith, because of its fundamental and continuous negations of a transcendent God and the substantiality of individual souls, but also because, in addition to the difficulties inherent in every immanentist idealism, it adds some of its own, which are very grave. If reality is nothing other than the pure becoming of spirit, then everything that happens, in the realm of thought or action, is thereby justified: or rather, the concepts of truth, of justice, of beauty lose all content, since there no longer exists a rule to measure them, nor an absolute to ground them. V. GENTILI, GIOVANNI.

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ACTUALISM IN ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY.
The term actualism, referring to the philosophical current centered on the thought of G. Gentile, signifies the developments, deepenings, and transpositions of his followers or epigones. Three have been and remain, up to now, the principal orientations of actualism: a) the defense, in its integrity, of the speculative scope of the act in its dual meaning, epistemological (Kantian) of transcendental apperception and metaphysical (Hegelian) of the unity of the real, identified (immanently) with God; b) the elaboration of those transcendent elements which actualism is unable to resolve into the immanence of the act of thought, to the point of considering immanence as a transitory moment and transforming actualism itself into a transcendent or realistic idealism, decidedly theistic in the Christian-Catholic sense; c) the elaboration of the act in its pure, either epistemological or empirical, meaning, with the exclusion of its metaphysical sense. The first orientation has remained a school position without developments; the second can no longer be called actualism and today constitutes the autonomous current of “Christian spiritualism” (Carlini, Guzzo, Sciacca, La Via, etc.); the third may be considered the dissolution of Gentilian actualism, which, through criticism of what it has of metaphysical, abstract, and panlogistic, has been stripped of the principle of self-consciousness or of the transcendent subject and pushed toward empiricist, pragmatic, skeptical, irrationalist, etc., positions. Here we limit ourselves to speaking only of the first and third directions (commonly indicated by the designation of “Gentilian left”), leaving aside the second (improperly called “Gentilian right”), which is treated under the homonymous heading. We shall also deal with other idealists who, within actualism, by which they are influenced, assert other exigencies.

More than any other, Vito Fazio Allmayer (b. in Palermo on 21 Nov. 1885, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of the same city) remained faithful to Gentilian actualism. He holds that the absolute subject produces the empirical subjects and resolves them in its act, identifying morality, which is action, with the perpetual resolving of the constituted ego into an act that surpasses it, into “that act which constitutes eternal human personality, in which we, annihilating ourselves, live: since it lives in us.” To respect ourselves and others means to respect the absolute ego. In the act thus conceived, religion is resolved, understood not as adoration of the absolute fully realized, but of the ethical absolute in fieri. “Every true religion will thus be resolved into 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 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 unfounded and arbitrary is the reduction, common to many forms of immanentism, of religion to morality. Fazio, according to the canons of idealist historiography (dialectical method), has written, among other things, three works of a historical nature: *G. Galilei* (Palermo 1914); *La teoria della libertà nella filosofia di Hegel* (Messina 1918); *Saggio su F. Bacone* (Palermo 1928).

A difference from Fazio Allmayer, who consistently reduces (and thereby denies the reality of) empirical subjects to transitory moments in 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) upholds the reality of the empirical and the individual. His dominant problem remains that of the relationship between religion and philosophy and the reduction of the latter to ethics. Not duality but the “comprehensibility” of the “many” and of the “one,” of “consciousness” and of “self-consciousness”: one must grasp “the personality of self-consciousness in every quiver of our being” (Lo spirito come eticità, Bologna 1921, p. 23), the eternal in the transitory. Matter, constituting 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 indistinguishable from its determinations; not the Gentilian “dramatism” “of a dual self, the empirical self and the pure self,” but rather the dramatism of the single self, in which the universal is resolved into “the personality of spirit, as absolute indivisible or living being” (ibid., p. 66). 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 the ought-to-be, the synthesis of happiness and duty, the absolute ethics of spirit.

Having resolved the transcendental Ego into the infinite plurality of subjects, into the concrete world of individuals, Saitta is led to uphold the value of feeling, sensation, and the corporeal, arriving at “the most audacious and 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). This culminates in the reevaluation of nominalism and the negation of all political and religious institutions, “veritable congelations of the human spirit” (La personalità umana, etc., pp. 130, 135, 138). Hence his violent and vulgar polemic against religion (especially Catholicism), which, in his view, denies the dignity and personhood of man, a “philosophy of death” (ibid., p. 22), “sheer materialism” (p. 32), and so on. Not the transcendent God (which leads to “ethical nihilism” [p. 49] and to a “slave morality”), but the “living God,” who is identified with human personality itself, the “modern God,” which is nothing other than the deification of man (ibid., pp. 20, 21). With Saitta, the attempt to eliminate every metaphysical and transcendental residue from Gentile’s system thus (inevitably) culminates in 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 absolute incomprehension, he reduces all of Thomism to theocracy and papism.

Another attempt (of greater speculative refinement) to deepen the critical understanding of actualism is represented by Ugo Spirito (b. at Arezzo on 6 Sept. 1896, professor of philosophy at the University of Rome), who was initially an apologist of actualism and 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 perpetuation of the dualisms of transcendental and empirical ego, of Act and its modes, and so on. 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 itself, the science of the “mythological” concept of God, the object of old abstract philosophy, but is identified with the various concrete forms of the activity of spirit (politics, law, art, etc.). Every judgment about reality is at once particular and universal, every knowledge at once scientific and philosophical: not two forms of knowledge, but two necessary moments of every knowledge. Thus actualism approaches Croce’s sense of philosophy as a “worldly” science, not one that theologizes.

Subsequently, Spirito (La vita come ricerca, Florence 1937; La vita come arte, 1914; Il problematismo, 1918) elaborated, still within actualism, that position of thought which has since become characteristic of him, namely, problematism: given that actualism’s “antinomy” constitutes the essence of thought, any solution is illusory, and one is left only with living the very problematicity, the ever-open research, the ever-unresolved dilemma. Hegel deserves credit for positing the essence of thought in its antinomic or dialectical process, but he regarded dialectic as a solution. Hence dialectic has become a “myth,” as have actualism and historicism, “myth” every philosophical position that presents itself as a solution. It is true that either one attains the metaphysical system or there is no philosophy, since “research” is not philosophy but merely a desire or need for philosophy; but it is also true that self-possession is unattainable: either research or the immediacy of life as art, which is neither self-possession nor 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 thus the necessity of theological transcendence (“the present necessity”: La vita come ricerca, p. 34), which he, however, considers “mythical” himself. But this is an unfounded assertion, a “dogmatic” halt at sheer problematism, which intrinsically demands a “metaphysical solution.” His failure 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 (b. at Rome on 4 Dec. 1904, professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Pisa) also seeks to eliminate the intellectualist residues found in Gentile’s actualism, which, however, deserves credit for identifying reality with the act of thinking, with theorizing thought rather than theorized thought. But if this is so, one must renounce constructing a theory of the act of thought, a logic and a gnoseology (La conclusione della filosofia del conoscere, Florence 1938). The logos, knowing, and dialectic are the very act of “considering consciousness” and never a “considered fact”; hence every logic and every gnoseology are impossible. The rules of logic and the principles of gnoseology refer not to knowing but to praxis: “the logos has no laws other than that of its absolute superiority to every law; and if, therefore, those that have been thought to be 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 ego lies in self-consciousness as will or pure ethics (ibid., p. 38). There is no theoretical philosophy, only a philosophy of praxis: “absolute moralism.”

(founded on pure moral faith) or even "absolute pedagogism," inasmuch as morality and pedagogy are moments of a single act: "the pedagogical demand that, after having made the self place its own limit in the thou (morality), makes the thou place its limit in the him (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 his later publications *Estetica Semantica Istorica* (ibid. 1947), *Logica Gnoseologica Metafisica* (ibid. 1948). Calogero also wrote notable works (though 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* (ibid. 1936), etc.

A strong ethical (as well as aesthetic) demand drives the thought of Vladimiro Arangio-Ruiz (b. in Naples on 18 Feb. 1888, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Florence), an unsatisfied adherent of actualism who, as he himself says, has left his followers "with empty hands." It is precisely this ethical demand that satisfies him, inasmuch as it does not posit the antithesis of being and ought-to-be, of real and 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 should, that we ourselves would wish to make real; it is the 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 vividly present in the thought of Gaetano Chiavacci (b. 19 June 1886, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Florence), more influenced than 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 all 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 is outside of time" (*Illusione e realtà*, Florence 1932, p. 219): actuality pertains to existence, act to reality; the former is illusion, the latter is "persuasion" or reality. Between these two poles unfolds the drama of man, who yearns to overcome the multiplicity of finite space-time and to conquer the unity of self in a present where time does not count. In this struggle, one gains awareness of the nothingness of the world, a nothingness that is suffering but also the catharsis of man, who, through the awareness of the nothingness of things, opens the way to the solution of the problem of self 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 natural personality as not one’s own and at the same time to "accept" them: "whoever truly devalues life finally understands this paradoxical truth that it is worth enduring life if one thus arrives at devaluing it." One must reject every support, 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 as victory over our particular self (illusion) and as the perennial aim of our consciousness of God (reality) (*Saggio della natura dell’uomo*, Florence 1936; *La ragione poetica*, ibid. 1948). "Detaching" oneself from things is to grasp their eternal being. A wisdom of Spinozist, Schopenhauerian type, and thus a wisdom of despair, futile 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 empty interiority, vainly seeking to fill itself with immense silence and solemn peace. Yet of the actualists considered here, Chiavacci is the most thoughtful and profound.

Opposite demands are asserted within actualism by 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), namely the human and historical concrete. 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) that must be overcome in a "humanistic philosophy," which 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 "individuability" or "singularity," which he now equates with historical-critical materialism, an enemy of every form of Platonism, interiorism, and Christianity (*Critica dei princìpi logici*, Messina 1942; *Discorso sull’ineguaglianza*, Rome 1943; *La filosofia dell’esperienza di D. Hume*, Florence 1933-35).

By contrast, Santino Cramella (b. in Genoa on 22 June 1902, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Catania) has moved ever further from both actualist and historicist immanentism, having progressed from his early Croceian phase (*Religione, Teosofia, Filosofia*, Bari 1931; *Senso comune, teoria e pratica*, ibid. 1933) to a "critical spiritualism" now decisively oriented toward theological transcendence (*Ideologia*, Catania 1942; *Metalogica*, ibid. 1945).

Alongside Guido De Ruggiero (q.v.), who in his later thought moved away from actualism, other actualists have made notable contributions to the history of philosophy, 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 latter two now Catholics), but above all pedagogy, both through the 1923 reform 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, d. in Rome in 1938, where he taught for many years), as well as Ernesto Codignola (b. in Genoa on 23 June 1885, professor at the University of Florence). They helped free Italian schools from positivist and Herbartian methods and to ground pedagogy on philosophical foundations. Undoubtedly, actualism has effectively contributed to renewing all Italian culture of our century, but it is now in sharp decline. With the so-called left-wing actualists, it has lost its metaphysical soul and become skepticism, materialism, or inconsistent moralism. Yet the concepts of reality as spirit and of the interiority of truth to spirit remain, though they must be recovered on the ground of theological transcendence, where alone spirit and authentic interiority have meaning.

ACTUALISM - AUBENAS

THE AUTHOR ON PSYCHOLOGY. — In a psychological sense, *attualismo* designates the positivistic 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 flow 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, *attualismo* 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 other than an emergent aspect of bio-physiological processes.

The actualist hypothesis, fraught with negative consequences for the universal and spiritual values of human life, presents an internal weakness that cannot be remedied by its inability to provide a sufficient theoretical-genetic interpretation of psychic acts, particularly those of a spiritual order, and to philosophically ground the reality and unity of the human person. (v. ANIMA; PSICOLOGIA)