BONATELLI, FRANCESCO. — Spiritualist philosopher, born in Iseo on 25 April 1830, died on 13 May 1911 in Padua, where he taught at the University. He opposed positivism and idealism. He may be connected with the Italian spiritualists of the first half of the century, although he detected in their doctrine significant remnants of that subjectivity to which they themselves were opposed, and reacted against II. He looked to the German psychological movement, and above all to that of Lotze. His psychologism was in fact a reaction against transcendentalism, which he regarded as the source of universalistic and subjectivistic error. In his investigation, which, although lacking systematic character, is not without acuteness and depth, he sought the new foundation of true objectivity, which for B. lies in consciousness and cannot be separated from the absolute position of eternal values. In God, in fact, “perfect ideality, the greatest reality, and absolute necessity are indissolubly united.”
The activity of the spirit and the process of reality that follows from it culminate in the knowledge and absoluteness of God, affirmed by B.’s orthodox faith, and knowable through the theoretical process of potential or involuted thought and actualized or explicit thought, which proceeds by analogy from the simple to the composite and, by a law of idealization of the Ego, from the finite to the infinite. B.’s chief merit is to have brought the problem of the objectivity of knowing within the sphere of consciousness and to have recognized the danger that arises when the epistemological process unfolds and exhausts itself subjectively. Cognitive activity is fundamentally an activity of judgment, but the concept does not fully realize the objectivity that, above the knowing intellect, is an activity of consciousness; this is actualized in the idea, which has been interpreted Platonically by many. In truth, the idea is constitutive of the real; it is the content of consciousness itself and is transcendent in relation to it insofar as it leads us back to the action and consciousness of the Creator. It is only in this sense that B.’s dualism can be called original, namely, insofar as it goes back to the position of divine transcendence, to the duality of man and God, the finite and the infinite. A duality of functions and of process rather than of substance, because B. himself concludes that “the duality disappears altogether when the mind recognizes that in the absolute ideality and reality, precisely because both are absolute and primordial, are identified.”
This conclusion is even more legitimate when one considers that, for B., above theoretical knowledge, which reveals only one aspect of the real, stands the evaluative or estimative judgment, which completes the concept of reality. It is a vindication of values that establishes the decisive primacy of practical reason and the clear predominance of moral and religious interests as the integral and unifying criterion of the science of the real.