GENTILE, GIOVANNI. — Philosopher, educationalist, and politician, born at Castelvetrano (Trapani) on 30 May 1875, assassinated in Florence on 15 April 1944. He studied at the Scuola Normale of Pisa (1893–97), where, among others, the Hegelian D. Jaia was his teacher. He first taught in the secondary schools of Campobasso and Naples (1898–1906), then, from 1903, as a lecturer at the University of Naples; from 1907 he taught the history of philosophy at the University of Palermo, where he also carried out significant activity as president of the «Biblioteca filosofica». In 1914 he succeeded his teacher in the chair at Pisa, which he held until 1918, when he moved to Rome, where he taught until his death. From 1903 to 1922 he was a highly active contributor to Croce’s La critica and exercised a decisive influence on Italian philosophy; in 1920 he began publishing the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, the official organ of actualism and still today a representative journal of the thought (no longer actualist) of some of his pupils and followers. He was Minister
of Public Education from 1922 to 1924 and promoted the well-known educational reform that bears his name. The foundation of the Catholic University of Milan had his support and his signature as minister. A senator from 1922 to 1935, he promoted and directed the Enciclopedia italiana. Many other cultural initiatives were owed to his intelligent and indefatigable activity as a scholar and innovator.
G., the philosopher of «actual idealism» or «actualism» (v.), was among the major Italian thinkers of the first half of our century. His rich and profound humanity led him above all to be a man of the school, a teacher: G. was a born educator, as is attested both by the broad following (and also the fascination) he enjoyed among the young people at the universities where he taught, and by the fact that almost all his fundamental writings originated in his teaching. This explains his identification of philosophizing with the ethical process of the spirit and, ultimately, with «educating», which is «self-education».
G. himself outlines the derivation of his thought in the following terms: «Historically, actualist philosophy is connected with German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, directly and through the followers, expositors, and critics whom the German thinkers of that period had in Italy during the last century. But it is connected with the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance (Telesio, Bruno, Campanella), with the great Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, and with the renewers of Italian speculative thought in the age of the national Risorgimento: Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti» (Introd. alla filos. [Firenze 1933], p. 20). It is necessary, however, to emphasize the influence of Fichte and Spaventa more than these lines might suggest, and to clarify that Italian philosophy, from the Renaissance to Gioberti, is connected with actualism only because G. gives an immanentist (Kantian and idealist) interpretation of thinkers who were unquestionably Catholic, such as Campanella, Vico, and Rosmini. Likewise, as more recent criticism has demonstrated, the undeniable derivation from Spaventa must be understood in the sense of G.’s personal interpretation of certain writings by the Neapolitan philosopher, and Hegel’s rethinking as the elimination of whatever realist element still remained in the German philosopher’s system. This becomes clear precisely from G.’s first fundamental theoretical writings, collected in the volume La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (Palermo 1913). Here G. calls his philosophy «actual idealism», because the «idea» is considered therein as «act» and because «the equation of Hegelian becoming with the act of thought, as the sole concrete logical category» is established (ibid., pref.). Hegel, on the other hand, according to G., abstractly presupposes being and non-being to becoming, which in this way can no longer be either possessed or explained. Being must not be presupposed to thought; being is a product of thought. Hegel lacked the requirement of «subjectivity», and therefore his logic, fixed in the position of Platonic ideas, is the apparent movement of «thought ideas» and not the real becoming of «thinking thought» (ibid., p. 25). This is precisely the new point of view attained by G.: the object of thought is the very act of thinking, «thought, which is thought, begins to think as something other than itself» (ibid., p. 207). In short, what is thought is the very thinking thought that objectifies itself. The method of this philosophy is that of «immanence», which «consists in the concept of the absolute concreteness of the real in the act of thought, or in history; an act that transcends itself when it begins to posit something (God, nature, logical law, moral law, historical reality as a collection of facts, spiritual or psychic categories beyond the activity of consciousness) that is not the same I as the positing of itself, or, as Kant said, the “I think”» (ibid., p. 208). Outside the act of thinking there is no concrete object: the I is conscious of the object insofar as it is conscious of itself in the act of thinking it, that is, insofar as it is self-consciousness.
All G.’s works develop, with a wealth of themes, this concept of thought as an act in which everything is immanent, and apply it to all philosophical problems and to every form of activity of the spirit, from the Sommario
The Sommario, one of the classic texts of pedagogy (which «as the science of education» is identified with «philosophy as the science of spiritual reality» [I, p. 64]), is the first robust systematization of actualism. In it G. develops and clarifies the concept of the identity-distinction of the grades of the spirit: the unity of the spiritual act does not permit sensation, perception, representation, volition, and so forth to be distinguished, insofar as all are resolved into the single act of thinking. Every spiritual act is a deepened consciousness of a preceding act: not a phenomenology of the grades of the spirit, but of the single spiritual act which, as eternal mediation, is eternal development through infinite moments (Somm., part 1ᵃ). Nothing can be presupposed to thought: everything—nature and the logos—must be deduced from it, because everything is its realization. The act of thinking «hovers between two selves, the first of which is subject and the other object only in this mutual mirroring of one in the other, through the concrete and absolute act of thought» (Teoria, 5ᵃ ed., p. 245). Evidently, the transcendental I, Absolute Subjectivity, resolves particular subjectivities or empirical selves within itself, of which it is the unity: empirical selves are neither real nor immortal; the one transcendental I is immortal. The Spirit unifies things, which are multiplicities, in the unity of consciousness: unity and multiplicity are moments of a single act, which is the Spirit as a constructive process. The Spirit is the dialectic not of thought thought, but of thinking thought, «which in its actuality, which is becoming and development, indeed posits the identical as its own object, but precisely by virtue of the process of its development, which is not identity, that is, abstract unity, but unity and multiplicity together, identity and difference» (Teoria, pp. 44–45). The same dialectical process is applied to the three moments
absolute moments in the becoming of the Spirit: a) art, or the moment of pure and therefore abstract subjectivity: «... in its immediacy it eludes every effort that thought makes to reach it» (La filos. dell'arte, p. 119). For art to be understood, the moment of pure subjectivity, in which it consists, must be considered in the dialectical development of the spirit, which is thought; that is, it must enter «into spiritual actuality» (ibid., p. 125). b) Religion, or the moment of pure objectivity, as consciousness of the object, before which the subject annihilates itself. Truth is the product of thought in its formation and consequently God reveals himself in the divine character of truth, immanent in thought: «the personality of God, of which it is impossible to doubt, is the personality of the I...» (Nuova dimostrazione dell'esistenza di Dio, in Introduzione alla filos., p. 220). Later G. in the brief work La mia religione (Firenze 1943) professed himself «Christian» and «Catholic»: «Christian» because «the Christian religion is the religion of the spirit, for which God is spirit»; and «Catholic» because «religion is Church» with a Head, «let us even say a pope». Yet the God of whom G. speaks here is still the absolute I or the transcendental Spirit, and Catholicism is the generic gathering together in a «Church» and therefore «everyone is Catholic in his own way». c) Philosophy, or Thought in its full conquest and transparency to itself, in which, as its dialectical moments, artistic and religious feeling find their concreteness. Philosophy is the concrete logos (which resolves the abstract logos within itself) with which reality, which is history, is identified, or the totality of the categories of the real in its logical or dialectical development. History and philosophy are identified and are the same dialecticity in its «historicity», or the dialectical realization of humanity. Rather than verum et factum convertuntur one must say verum et fieri convertuntur.
But it is precisely the «actuality of thinking thought» that remains, one might say, suspended in G.'s philosophy, and whose deepening is the keystone for criticizing the entire system from within. Indeed, thinking thought, always actual, is always unrealized: it transcends the act and every act. In its pure transcendentality it eludes itself, it cannot be grasped, both because it is more than any of its acts and because, as pure subjectivity, it is abstract and is compelled to mediate itself in the dialectical relation of subjectivity-objectivity. The act to which everything is immanent, as a perpetual and inadequate act, is self-transcendence. And since G. identifies the object or being with the very act of thinking, from which it is deduced, it follows that the pure actuality of the act is empty. From this transcendence, immanent in pure transcendentality itself, it is impossible to pass to authentic transcendence, insofar as Gentilian transcendentality is Subjectivity: an objective element is lacking in it, that is, the idea as truth given to the mind. Thus the absolute is the Subject itself, not truth. But by this G. precisely denies idealism, insofar as the idea is no longer the objective element, thought but not created by thought, but the act itself, that is, the subject itself. Yet by this the thinking Subject is also denied, insofar as it is thought of its own subjectivity, that is, empty thinking. The denials of God as transcendent being, of the reality of subjects (actualism and solipsism), as well as of freedom and morality, are consequences of the non-idealistic presupposition (insofar as it precisely denies the idea) of the reduction of the idea to the subjectivity of the act of thought and of the implicit (and unjustifiable) conception of philosophy as «development», and not as «discovery» of truth. This led G. to identify philosophy with history and, with it, all reality in an immanentism that is positivism and no longer authentic idealism; and if it is not so completely, this is due to the felicitous contradiction whereby thinking thought transcends all
thought thought and therefore history. By deepening this point, to the point of overturning the premises and conclusions, actualism can become fruitful for the purpose of rethinking classical idealism (which is realism) and of justifying those values (the spirit, freedom, interiority, religion) for whose vindication G. devoted his noble and vigorous intellect.
All of G.'s works are on the Index (decree of 20 June 1934).