MARTINETTI, PIERO. - Philosopher, b. at Pont (Aosta) on 21 Aug. 1872, d. there on 22 March 1943. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Milan from 1904 to 1933. A reserved and disdainful character, he had a religious sense of philosophy and of philosophizing; a thinker of vast and solid philosophical culture, of rigorous method and strong capacities for historical and theoretical synthesis, together with Varisco (v.) he is the most representative figure of Italian critical idealism. Indian philosophy, Plotinus and Manichaeism for antiquity, Spinoza, Kant and Schopenhauer for the modern age: these are the philosophies and the philosophers whose influence he felt most and which he elaborated in contact with contemporary thought, especially German.
His principal work remains the Introduzione alla metafisica (Turin 1904; 2nd ed., Milan 1929), in which M. systematically develops his own theory of knowledge, accompanied by an extensive historical excursus, which is a true model. The critique of knowledge is not «a formal examination of the cognitive procedures of thought on the part of thought itself, but the critical examination of knowledge in general, which embraces the whole of reality, with the aim of eliminating metaphysical points of view that are insufficient in order to grasp a higher one» (Introduc., pp. 40-51). Reality is neither the mirroring of an object in itself in the subject (uncritical realism), nor the production of the subject (transcendental idealism): but it is consciousness itself which, considered in its multiplicity and in the independence of the conscious elements that constitute it, is the world, the object; considered in the unity of the overall synthesis it is the I, the subject (ibid., p. 110).
The multiplicity of particular subjects points back to a unity, to the absolute Subject, in which subjects tend to identify themselves: life in the Absolute, in God, is the supreme end of religious consciousness. The process of knowing is an «ascesis» from the sensible to the intelligible, a process of «liberation» from evil and of return to the whole (a Neoplatonizing pantheism with strong Spinozistic and Schopenhauerian influences, as well as Oriental ones). But the Absolute cannot be grasped by any intellectual form, and therefore all of them are the relative or partial expression of the Absolute itself, which remains beyond every possible form of knowledge. The One can be expressed only by means of «symbols», that is, of imaginative or rational representations that are inadequate and relative, each of which is a faith. Therefore religious faith for M. is a degree (the highest) of philosophy and is resolved into the rationality of philosophy itself, with the intransigent exclusion of all revealed or supernatural knowledge.
Not rational necessity, but chance is opposed to freedom; indeed «freedom not only does not exclude, but implies necessity, because it excludes contingency» (La libertà, Milan 1928, p. 338). «Freedom is the autonomous unfolding of a conscious subject, which implies causal concatenation. Freedom of spontaneity or practical freedom is not yet moral freedom. This is not an absurd faculty of good and evil; it is one thing with the power, with the dignity of the upright soul» (ibid., p. 401), which is respect for and fulfillment of the moral law. But the order that man tends to realize in the gradual conquest of freedom always remains an ideal, which is real in God, whom religious consciousness thinks as absolute totality and perfection. Not a personal God (otherwise neither the responsibility nor the freedom of man could any longer be explained), but an impersonal Reason, to be thought as a true omnituale realitatis, in which the various moments of reason are preserved indestructibly. «The essence and principle of man's freedom is therefore in his divine personality, in his absolute being as it is coessentially in absolute Reason» (ibid., p. 491).
In a system so rigidly pantheistic, philosophy cannot be understood except as profound religiosity, a thirst for the divine that is in us and that is the very essence of God, to which we aspire to assimilate ourselves. On the one hand, therefore, M. resolves religion into philosophy, faith into reason (Ragione e fede, Milan 1934, p. 44); and, on the other, he criticizes all religious confessions and, among all of them, most harshly Catholicism, and advocates the constitution of small free and independent Churches, stripped of all exteriority of religious practices, in agreement on the fundamental points of evangelical morality and on «rational» faith in a transcendent Reality: in short, a form of deism. Jesus Christ (as one reads in Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo, a work that betrays a deplorable misunderstanding of Christianity and of Catholicism and the preconceived resolve to limit himself to Protestant sources) would be a kind of prophet (among many) of the transcendent, sad and pessimistic about the redemption of humanity from evil and confident in a kind of final outcome of the world as the annihilation of phenomenal appearances in the Whole. The following are on the Index: G. Cristo e il Cristianesimo; Ragione e Fede; Il Vangelo con introduzione e note (decree of 3 Dec. 1937).
It is superfluous to say that M.'s Christianity is the negation of authentic Christianity and of Catholicism in its totality. It is enough to think that for him primitive Christianity is found uncorrupted only in Marcion and in Mani. M. as philosopher and above all as methodologist of philosophical problems is undoubtedly superior to M. the «theologian» of a «Reason» in which the world, its appearance, is annihilated for no other motive than the irrational and absurd necessity of Reason itself.
Bibliography4 works
Michele Federico Sciacca