Gentile, Giovanni

GENTILE, GIOVANNI. - Philosopher, educationist and politician, b. at Castelvetrano (Trapani) on 30 May 1875, d. assassinated at Florence on 15 Apr. 1944. He studied at the Scuola Normale of Pisa (1893-97), where, among others, he had as his teacher the Hegelian D. Jaia. He first taught in the Licei of Campobasso and Naples (1898-1906), then, from 1903, as a libero docente, at the University of Naples; from 1907 he taught the history of philosophy at the University of Palermo, where he also carried on notable activity as president of the «Biblioteca filosofica». In 1914 he succeeded at Pisa to the chair of his teacher, which he held until 1918, the year in which he moved to Rome, where he taught until his death. From 1903 to 1922 he was a most active contributor to Croce's La critica and had a decisive influence on Italian philosophy; in 1920 he began the publication of the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, the official organ of actualism and still today a journal representative 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 school reform, which bears his name. The founding 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 are owed to his intelligent and tireless activity as a scholar and reformer.

G., the philosopher of «actual idealism» or of «actualism» (v.), was among the greatest Italian thinkers of the first half of our century. His rich and profound humanity led him to be above all a man of the school, a teacher: G. was a born educator, as attested both by the large following (and also the fascination) he had over the young people of the Universities where he taught, and by the fact that almost all his fundamental writings were born from teaching. This explains his identification of philosophizing with the ethical process of the spirit and, in the final analysis, with «educating», which is «self-educating».

G. himself thus outlines the derivation of his thought: «The actualist philosophy is historically connected to German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, directly and through the followers, expositors and critics that the German thinkers of that period had in Italy during the last century. But it is connected to the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance (Telesio, Bruno, Campanella), to the great Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, and to the renewers of Italian speculative thought in the age of the national Risorgimento: Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti» (Introd. alla filos. [Florence 1933], p. 20). One must, however, more than appears from these lines, note the influence of Fichte and of Spaventa and specify that Italian philosophy, from the Renaissance to Gioberti, is connected to actualism only because G. gives an immanentist (Kantian and idealist) interpretation of thinkers who are indisputably 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 a personal interpretation by G. of certain writings of the Neapolitan philosopher, and the rethinking of Hegel as the elimination of whatever is still realistic in the system of the German philosopher. This appears clearly precisely from G.'s first fundamental theoretical writings, collected in the volume La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (Palermo 1913). It is here that G. calls his philosophy «actual idealism», because the «idea» is there considered as «act» and because «the equation of the Hegelian becoming with the act of thought, as the only concrete logical category» is established (ibid., preface). Hegel, on the other hand, according to G., abstractly presupposes being and non-being to becoming which, in this way, can no longer be possessed or explained. Being is not to be presupposed to thought; being is a product of thought. Hegel lacked the exigency of «subjectivity», and therefore his logic, fixed in the positing of the 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 conquered by G.: the object of thought is the very act of thinking, the «thought, which is thought, begins to think as other than itself» (ibid., p. 207). In short, the 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 one 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 I itself as 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 of G.'s works develop, with a wealth of motifs, this concept of thought as act to which everything is immanent, and apply it to all philosophical problems and to every form of activity of the spirit, from the Sommario di pedagogia (2 vols., Bari 1912), to the Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (Pisa 1916), to the Discorsi di religione (Florence 1920), to the Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (2 vols., Bari 1920-23), which, together with the Introduzione alla filosofia (cit.), represent his fundamental theoretical writings. It is impossible to follow the whole of Gentile's problematic, but it is indispensable to fix its essentials.

The Sommario, one of the classic texts of pedagogy (which «as science of education» identifies itself with «philosophy as science of spiritual reality» [I, p. 64]), is the first robust systematization of actualism. In it G. develops and specifies the concept of the identity-distinction of the degrees of the spirit: the unity of the spiritual act does not permit distinguishing sensation, perception, representation, volition, etc., insofar as all are resolved in the single act of thinking. Every spiritual act is a deepened consciousness of a prior act: not a phenomenology of the degrees of the spirit, but of the single spiritual act which, as eternal mediation, is eternal development through infinite moments (Somm., part 1). 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 the one in the other, through the concrete and absolute act of thought» (Teoria, 5th ed., p. 245). Evidently the transcendental I, absolute Subjectivity, resolves in itself the particular subjectivities or empirical I's, of which it is the unity: the empirical I's are not real and immortal, the one transcendental I is immortal. The Spirit unifies things, which are multiplicity in the unity of consciousness: unity and multiplicity are moments of a single act, which is the Spirit as constructive process. The Spirit is the dialectic not of thought thought, but of thinking thought, «which in its activeness, which is becoming and development, posits indeed as its own object the identical, but precisely by means 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 applies to the three moments absolute moments of 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 within 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 annuls itself. Truth is a 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, in the brief work La mia religione (Florence 1943), G. professes 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." However, the God of whom G. here speaks is still the absolute I or the transcendental Spirit, and Catholicism is the generic gathering into a "Church," and therefore "each one is Catholic in his own way." c) Philosophy, or Thought in the full conquest and transparency of itself 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, identifies itself, or the totality of the categories of the real in its logical or dialectical development. History and philosophy identify with each other 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, up in the air in G.'s philosophy, and whose deepening is the keystone for criticizing the entire system from within. In fact, thinking thought, always actual, is always unactualized: it transcends the act and every act. In its pure transcendentality it escapes itself, it cannot be grasped, both because it is more than every one of its acts, and because, as pure subjectivity, it is abstract and is constrained to mediate itself in the dialectical relation of subjectivity-objectivity. The act to which everything is immanent, as a perennial and unattainable 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: there is lacking in it an objective element, that is, the idea as truth given to the mind. Therefore the absolute is the Subject itself, not the truth. But with this G. denies idealism itself, 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. But with this the thinking Subject is also denied, insofar as it is thought of its own subjectivity, that is, empty thinking. The negations 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 denies the idea itself) 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 this all of the real in an immanentism, which is positivism and no longer authentic idealism; and if it is not so to the very end, this is due to the fortunate contradiction that thinking thought transcends all thought thought, and therefore history. It is by deepening this point, to the point of overturning the premises and conclusions, that actualism can become fruitful for the purposes of a rethinking of classical idealism (which is realism) and of the justification of those values (spirit, freedom, interiority, religion) for whose vindication G. spent his noble and vigorous genius.

All of G.'s works are on the Index (decree of 20 June 1934).

G. Michele Federico Sciacca