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. Of retiring and disdainful character, he had a religious sense of philosophy and philosophizing; a thinker of broad and solid philosophical culture, rigorous method, and strong capacities for historical and theoretical synthesis, VAISON (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 philosophers whose influence he felt most strongly and which he elaborated in contact with contemporary thought, especially German thought.
His principal work remains 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 that is a true model. The critique of knowledge is not “a formal examination of the cognitive procedures of thought by thought itself, but the critical examination of knowledge in general, which embraces the whole of reality, with the aim of eliminating insufficient metaphysical points of view in order to grasp a higher one” (Introduc., pp. 40–51). Reality is neither the reflection of an object in itself within the subject (uncritical realism), nor the production of the subject (transcendental idealism): rather, 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 to a unity, 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 Spinozist and Schopenhauerian, as well as Eastern, influences). But the Absolute cannot be grasped by any intellectual form, and therefore all forms are the relative or partial expression of the Absolute itself, which remains beyond every possible form of knowledge. The One can be expressed only through “symbols,” that is, inadequate and relative imaginative or rational representations, each of which is a faith. Consequently, for M., religious faith is a degree—the highest—of philosophy and is resolved into the rationality of philosophy itself, with the uncompromising exclusion of all revealed or supernatural knowledge.
It is not rational necessity but chance that opposes freedom; indeed, “freedom not only does not exclude necessity, but implies it, because it excludes contingency” (La libertà, Milan 1928, p. 338). “Freedom is the autonomous development of a conscious subject, which implies causal concatenation. The freedom of spontaneity, or practical freedom, is not yet moral freedom. The latter is not an absurd faculty for good and evil; it is one and the same thing as the power and dignity of the upright soul” (ibid., p. 401), which consists in respect for and fulfillment of the moral law. But the order that man seeks to realize in the gradual conquest of freedom always remains an ideal, which is real in God, whom religious consciousness conceives as totality and absolute perfection. Not a personal God—otherwise neither human responsibility nor freedom could be explained—but an impersonal Reason, to be conceived as a true
omnituale realitatis, in which the various moments of reason are indestructibly preserved. “The essence and principle of human freedom is therefore in his divine personality, in his absolute being, just as it is coessentially in absolute Reason” (ibid., p. 491).
In a system so rigidly pantheistic, philosophy can be understood only as profound religiosity, a thirst for the divine that is in us and that is the very essence of God, to whom we aspire to assimilate ourselves. On the one hand, therefore, M. resolves religion into philosophy and faith into reason (Ragione e fede, Milan 1934, p. 44); on the other, he criticizes all religious confessions, and among them Catholicism most harshly, and advocates the establishment of small free and independent Churches, stripped of all outward religious practices, agreeing on the fundamental points of evangelical morality and on “rational” faith in a transcendent Reality—in short, a form of deism. Jesus Christ (as is read in Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo, a work that reveals a deplorable misunderstanding of Christianity and Catholicism and the deliberate decision to restrict itself to Protestant sources) would be a kind of prophet—among many—of the transcendent, sad and pessimistic concerning the redemption of humanity from evil and confident in a kind of final outcome of the world as the annulment 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 goes without saying that M.’s Christianity is the negation of authentic Christianity and of Catholicism in its entirety. It is enough to consider that, for him, primitive Christianity is found uncorrupted only in Marcion and Mani. M. the philosopher, and especially the methodologist of philosophical problems, is unquestionably superior to M. the “theologian” of a “Reason” in which the world, its appearance, is annihilated for no other reason than the irrational and absurd necessity of Reason itself.