RENSI, GIUSEPPE. - Philosopher and political writer, b. 31 May 1871 at Villafranca (Treviso), d. at Genoa on 9 Feb. 1941. At first a journalist and lawyer, he later devoted himself to philosophy; he was a professor at the Universities of Florence, Messina, and (from 1918) Genoa. A brilliant writer of vast but not profound culture, a restless spirit, he passed through the most varied philosophical experiences, from neo-Hegelian idealism to absolute skepticism and materialism.
Rensi's philosophy may be defined as the "system of doubt." The true skeptic for Rensi is not he who admits nothing as true (dogmatic skepticism), but he who "becomes and is such precisely because at a given moment a certain idea flashes upon him as truth, at other moments the impossibility of affirming it true... The essential character of skepticism is truly its being transmutable in all ways, that is, discerning and feeling intimately, not so much in a preponderant and primary way, the falsity, as the possible truth of all opposing theses" (Lineamenti di filosofia scettica, Bologna 1919, p. xxvi). The skeptic is always for all "beliefs" and all "faiths," provided they are considered as "beliefs" and "faiths" and no attempt is made to pass them off "as a pronouncement of reason in itself," of "fantastic" pure reason (ibid., p. 111). From this position of the "pluriversality" of reason, Rensi pushes on to the identification of reality with the absurd, in antithesis to the logicism of Hegel (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 last phase of his thought, he develops a materialist-pessimist skepticism, according to which everything is absurd and evil, and truth and good are an ideal projected into an unreal future. Time exists "solely because, every present being always absurd and evil, that is, reality, which is absolute present, being always irrational, a later is continually made in order to escape always from the now, to free oneself, by passing to another moment, from the evil that is 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: to silence reason and stop at sensations, in which the world and the I itself consist (Il materialismo critico, Milan 1927). This integral materialism finds its crowning in absolute atheism, of which Rensi wrote a most superficial Apologia (Rome 1926), "the highest and purest of all religions." And Rensi is truly a mystic of atheism, a man who all his life struggled against God in the accursed impossibility of being able to love him. His skepticism (and even more his atheism) is a congeries of states of mind, a dogmatic and also superficial explosion: the "possible truth of all opposing theses" would be impossible if truth did not exist, which Rensi denies for lack of critical depth.