AUTOCITISI (αὐτός “same” and κτίσις “creation”). — Self-creation, self-positing. The word goes back to B. Spaventa; the concept is central to Gentile’s actualism, which conceives reality as the immanent positing of Spirit in act. Reality is neither a presupposition nor something given before thought, but exists only insofar as it is present in thought; and thought itself exists only insofar as it is in act, in an eternal making and becoming, and, in this making of its own, realizes nature and history. Hence the only true reality is the act of thought (the subject), which eternally posits itself (self-thinking, self-consciousness, a.), and, in positing itself, also posits the world. “All nature and all history exists insofar as it is the creation of the I which bears it within itself and eternally produces it in itself, in its a.” (G. Gentile, General Theory of Spirit as Pure Act, 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 sole way of explaining 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, insofar as He is infinite perfection, in the substantial identity of being and thought (v. ATTUALISMO; GENTILE, GIOVANNI).