Giuseppe Rensi. Philosopher and political writer, born 31 May 1871 at Villafranca (Treviso), died at Genoa on 9 February 1941. Initially a journalist and lawyer, he later devoted himself to philosophy and held university chairs at Florence, Messina, and (from 1918) Genoa. A brilliant writer of wide but shallow culture and restless spirit, he passed through the most varied philosophical experiences from neo-Hegelian idealism to absolute scepticism and materialism.
Rensi’s philosophy may be described as a “system of doubt.” For him the true sceptic is not one who admits nothing as true (dogmatic scepticism) but rather one who “becomes and is such precisely because at one moment a certain idea flashes upon him as truth, at other moments the impossibility of affirming it as true... The essential character of scepticism is really to be mutable into all just positions, that is, to perceive and feel inwardly—not so much predominantly and in the first place the falsity—as the possible truth of all opposing theses” (Lineamenti di filosofia scettica, Bologna 1919, p. xxvi). The sceptic is always open to all “beliefs” and all “faiths,” provided they are regarded as such and not claimed to be “utterances of reason in itself,” of the “fanciful” pure reason (ibid., p. LII). From this position of the “pluriversity” of reason he advances to the identification of reality with the absurd, in antithesis to Hegel’s logicism (v.): “all that is real is irrational, all that is rational is unreal” (Le ragioni dell’irrazionalismo, 2nd ed., Naples 1933, p. 7). In the final phase of his thought he elaborates a materialist-pessimist scepticism according to which everything is absurd and evil, while truth and the good are ideals projected into an unreal future. Time exists “solely because every present is always absurd and evil, that is, since reality, which is absolute present, is always irrational, a ‘hereafter’ is continually sought to escape the present, to free oneself, by passing to another moment, from the evil that is in every ‘now’” (Interiora rerum, Milan 1924, p. 172). One can be freed from evil and despair only by returning to unconscious nature, to unawareness: silencing reason and resting in sensations, in which consist the world and the self (Il materialismo critico, Milan 1927). This integral materialism culminates in absolute atheism, on which Rensi wrote a most superficial Apologia (Rome 1926), “the highest and purest of all religions.” Rensi was indeed a mystic of atheism, a man who all his life struggled against God in the accursed impossibility of being able to love Him. His scepticism (and even more his atheism) is a compound of moods, an explosive and even superficial dogmatism: the “possible truth of all opposing theses” would be impossible if truth did not exist, which Rensi denies for lack of critical depth.