AUTOCITISI (Autos 'Self' and Ktisis 'Creation'). - Self-creation, positing of oneself. The word goes back to B. Spaventa; the concept is central to Gentile's actualism, which conceives reality as the immanent positing of the Spirit in act. Reality is neither a presupposition nor a datum over against thought, but is insofar as it is present in thought; and thought itself is only insofar as it is in act, in an eternal making and becoming, and, in this its making, realizing nature and history. Hence the only true reality is the act of thought (subject), which eternally posits itself (autonoesis, self-consciousness, a.), and, in positing itself, also posits the world. "All nature and all history is, insofar as it is the creation of the I that bears it within its bosom, and produces it eternally in itself, in its a." (G. Gentile, Teoria generale dello Spirito come Atto puro, Florence 1938, p. 252). In this sense a., as the principle of unification, indeed of absolute identification in the spiritual act, is presented by idealism as the only way to explain the reality (positivity) of the abstract and the concrete, of the universal and the individual (op. cit., p. 97 ff.).
Christian philosophy rejects the concept of a. as logically and metaphysically untenable, and opposes to it the concept of God as Pure Act, as infinite perfection, in the substantial identity of being and thought (v. ATTUALISMO; GENTILE, GIOVANNI).