RENSI, GIUSEPPE. — Philosopher and political writer, born on 31 May 1871 at Villafranca (Treviso), died at Genoa on 9 February 1941. Initially a journalist and lawyer, he subsequently devoted himself to philosophy; he was a professor at the Universities of Florence and Messina, and (from 1918) at Genoa. A brilliant writer of broad but not profound culture, and a restless spirit, he passed through the most varied philosophical experiences, from neo-Hegelian idealism to absolute scepticism and materialism.
The philosophy of R. may be defined as the “system of doubt.” For R., the true sceptic is not one who admits nothing as true (dogmatic scepticism), but one who “becomes and is such precisely because at a given moment a certain idea flashes upon him as truth, while at other moments the impossibility of affirming it as true... The essential character
of scepticism is truly to be transmutable in every way, that is, to discern and inwardly feel, not so much predominantly and in the first instance the falsity as the possible truth of all opposing theses” (Lineamenti di filosofia scettica, Bologna 1919, p. xxvi). The sceptic is always in favour of all “beliefs” and all “faiths,” provided that they are regarded as “beliefs” and “faiths” and one does not claim to make them pass “as a pronouncement of reason in itself,” of “fantastical” pure reason (ibid., p. 111). From this position of the “pluriversality” of reason, R. proceeds to identify reality with the absurd, in opposition to Hegel’s logicism (v.): “everything that is real is irrational, everything that is rational is unreal” (Le ragioni dell'irrazionalismo, 2nd ed., Naples 1933, p. 7). In the final phase of his thought, he developed a materialistic-pessimistic scepticism, according to which everything is absurd and evil, while truth and goodness are ideals projected into an unreal future. Time exists “solely because, since every present is always absurd and evil—that is, since reality, which is absolute present, is always irrational—a later moment is continually posited in order always to escape from the now, to free oneself, by passing into another moment, from the evil that exists in every now” (Interiore rerum, Milan 1924, p. 172). One can free oneself from evil and despair only by returning to unconscious nature, to unawareness: silencing reason and stopping at sensations, in which the world and the very self consist (Il materialismo critico, Milan 1927). This integral materialism finds its crowning achievement in absolute atheism, of which R. wrote a very superficial Apologia (Rome 1926), “the highest and purest of all religions.” And R. is truly a mystic of atheism, a man who throughout his life struggled against God in the accursed impossibility of being able to love him. His scepticism (and even more so his atheism) is a collection of states of mind, a dogmatic and also superficial outburst: the “possible truth of all opposing theses” would be impossible if truth did not exist, which R. denies through a failure of critical depth.