SPIRITUALISMO. — An ambiguous philosophical term whose meaning is not easily definable, given the variety of its usages. Moreover, under this name it is possible to bring together metaphysical, moral, psychological, and other doctrines that may even be opposed to one another, some of which, when examined more deeply, prove to be negations of spirit as such. Here we shall limit ourselves to examining the principal meanings and to providing a valid theoretical orientation for distinguishing the true from the false. The entries should also be consulted: ANIMA; INTELLETTO; SPIRITO; SPIRITUALE.
There is a spontaneous form of s., in a certain sense instinctive in man: spirit is above nature, the spiritual above the material. Reflection, to which the problem of the relation between spirit and nature first presents itself, is exercised upon this common and highly indicative experience. According to how this problem is resolved (metaphysically, that is), namely, according to the relation that is established (of identity, opposition, etc.), one arrives at spiritualistic, materialistic, naturalistic, and other conclusions, differing spirit (v.), nature (v.), and matter (v.) are conceived.
There is an s. that may be called absolute: everything is spirit (monism [v.], as opposed to materialistic monism: “everything is matter”). In this sense, transcendental idealism has defined itself as absolute s.: nature is a dialectical moment of Spirit, always resolved within it; so-called matter is a pure “phenomenon” or an inferior degree that remains overcome by the movement of Spirit itself (this doctrine is common to all forms of acosmic pantheism [v.], which resolve and annul the world in God). But, if considered carefully, this radical s. is, fundamentally, naturalism (v.) animism (v.), even if philosophically more mature than that of antiquity and the Renaissance (Telesio [v.], for example). Indeed, the “spiritualization” of nature and matter, given the perfect adequation between nature and spirit (inevitable in every immanentist conception), results in the “naturalization” of Spirit. It may seem paradoxical, but the spiritualistic monism of modern idealism is, fundamentally, materialistic monism; indeed, Marx (v.) Hegel (v.). Absolute s., in this sense, proceeds not from Spirit (metaphysically), but from Nature, initially conceived as unconscious thought that inwardly works upon II. In Greek antiquity, Stoicism (v.), for example, presupposes this original and final monism (which is materialistic), expressed poetically by Virgil in the celebrated verse “Mens agitat molem”. In modern idealism it finds its most Schelling (v.): Nature is the preparation of consciousness; it unconsciously works to produce it; consequently, the I is nothing but a product of Nature, in which the unconscious thought that Nature is becomes conscious: Consciousness is nothing but Nature at the highest point of its self-potentiation, and Nature is nothing but depotentialized Consciousness, the prehistory of spirit; Nature is visible Spirit, Spirit is invisible Nature (Addition [1803] to Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797). “The task of all science is to construct the emergence of a fixed product” (Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799, § 6). Everything, from the standpoint of absolute Reason (“total indifference of the Subjective and the Objective”), is one and indivisible. Outside Reason, “simply one and identical with itself,” “there is nothing”; and nothing is a being outside absolute Identity, which is “one and the same with Reason.” In itself there is “no antithesis between Subject and Object,” but only “quantitative difference”; “absolute Identity is not the cause of the Universe, but is the Universe itself” (coeternal with it), and “as regards its essence” it is “the same in every part of the Universe” (Presentation of My Philosophical System, 1801, §§ 1–33). The movement of reason (of philosophy) is to “undifferentiate,” to proceed from the differentiated to the identical, that is, to reabsorb the world into the Absolute, which is Spirit or Nature indifferently. Thus, as was said, absolute s., in Schelling’s idealism (but also in Hegel’s logical idealism and Gentile’s [v.] “actual” idealism), is absolute naturalism, or naturalistic monism, in which spirit and matter are two forces balancing the expansion of nature; which is tantamount to saying that undifferentiated Nature “appears” as matter and as spirit (see also System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800, sec. III, ch. II, C, II). A different form of absolute s. is Berkeley’s (v.) “immaterialism”: only spirits really exist; matter has no existence other than that of “being perceived” (Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713, D. 1).
S., with the exception of its monistic form, always entails a dualistic conception: spirit and body (psychological s.); spiritual life and animal nature (moral and sociological s., according as the individual or society is considered); spiritual substance and material or extended substance (ontological s.), or mechanism and life; spirit or flesh (religious s. in the Christian sense). Duality alone, however, is not enough for a doctrine to be defined as spiritualistic; it is also necessary to admit: a) the independence of spirit from body or nature; b) its non-derivability from matter; c) its supremacy over the body. Naturally, the way in which duality is understood (as opposition, heterogeneity, etc.) determines the way in which the relations between spirit and body, and between spirit and nature, are understood. Here, one may say, lies the testing ground of every spiritualistic theory: a) radical dualism between spirit or soul and body or matter? In that case, the unity of the human composite is compromised: the ontological opposition between spirit and body inevitably leads to assigning to one attributes opposed to those of the other, and to making them two enemies in perpetual conflict; b) duality, yes, but understood in such a way as not to compromise the substantial unity that each individual human being is? This doctrine may present the danger (as in Aristotle) of rendering the ontological distinction between spirit and body doubtful (and, consequently, the personal immortality of the soul), but it has the advantage of not opposing one to the other, of not making their relation inexplicable, and of not going so far as to deny matter every positivity, making it “non-being or the absolutely formless.” Thesis a) may be defined, in a broad sense, as “Platonic”; thesis b) as “Aristotelian,” provided that one bears in mind that there may be Platonic s. without accepting Plato’s (v.) rigid ontological dualism—for example, s. Augustine (v.)—just as there may be Aristotelian s. without falling into the dangers of naturalism—for example, s. REID, THOMAS (v.). This already indicates the form of s. that, when critically examined in depth, proves to be the only true and authentic one: namely, ontological s. (which is also psychological, moral, sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, and religious), proper to the Christian tradition, Augustinian and at the same time Thomistic, which, rationally grounded, is in harmony with revealed truth, insofar as it rests upon a theistic and creationist metaphysics (itself rigorously rational, though not “rationalistic”).
That being so, strictly speaking, it may perhaps not be possible to speak of genuine s. before Christianity, which, through Revelation (in fact, though not by right), made known the concepts of creation and of the spirit as a personal substance created by God. In Greek philosophy, the spirit is either still conceived materialistically (v. SPIRITO) or as an impersonal entity (soul), understood as an eternal element immanent in (or entering into contact with) physical and human nature; hence psychism: ψυχή is the (cosmic) principle of life and, as such, is eternal; it is found in nature (“World Soul”) and manifests itself in different degrees (as vegetative soul or life in plants, sensitive soul in animals, rational soul in human beings), of which the higher includes the lower one or ones. In this sense, the first to consider the Intellect (νοῦς) explicitly as the metaphysical Anaxagoras (v.); but, precisely, Anaxagorean νοῦς is physical “force,” “the lightest (λεπτέτατον) and purest (καθαρώτατον) of all things, of which it is the soul” (ψυχή), knowledge, and order (p. 12, Diela); in short, νοῦς is “the principle of movement,” which shakes inert matter, producing “the separation of all things” (ibid., p. 13). Thus, νοῦς is an “animated” principle (psychism), not yet a spiritual one, which solves a problem of a “physical” order; it is not yet spirit or consciousness, so much so that “intelligence” is neither its primary quality nor, still less, its essence. Plato (Phaed., 976–85) and Aristotle recognized this, the latter observing, like Plato, that Anaxagoras employs νοῦς only “as a mechanism in the constitutive process of the world” (Met., I, 985 a).
Socrates (v.), s. is formulated for the first time, explicitly and distinctly, by Plato, with the dualism of the two worlds, the sensible world of things and the intelligible world of Ideas. Dualism: a) metaphysical, between Being (ideas) and becoming (things); b) cosmological, between the Demiurge, “maker” of the world, and eternal matter; c) psychological, between the intellective soul and the body; d) ethical, between the end of the soul (the contemplation of the Ideas) and that of the body (attachment to sensible things). Platonic dualism, also influenced by religious beliefs (Orphic-Pythagorean), not only compromises, almost to the point of making them inexplicable, the relations between soul and body (and hence the unity of the human composite), but does not entirely transcend psychism and cosmologism. Indeed, for Plato too there is a “World Soul” (generated by the Demiurge and therefore not belonging to the intelligible world, Timaeus, 35a and 37a), to which a twofold movement is given without its directly causing the movement itself (as earlier in Phaedrus, 245 c). The soul proper to man, immortal because “similar” or “akin” to the Ideas (Phaed., 79-c-e), is conceived as a “demon” or an entity in itself, which falls into a body without forming a unity with it: the personal immortality of the soul is compromised (v. especially Phaedo and Repub., bk. X). Platonic s. is led to these consequences by its conception of matter (χώρα ἐνάγκη), understood as pure negativity and the principle of evil and corruption. Accordingly, spiritual activity is wholly occupied in fleeing from the “prison” (σῆμα) of the body (σῶμα), in order to rise to the Beautiful in itself (Symposium), the Good in itself (Republic), Being in itself (Sophist), in short, to the world of Ideas or of pure Truth (Phaedo); Eros is satisfied only when the soul rises to the “sole science” of the Beautiful in itself, far removed from mortal truths (Symposium, 210 c, 211 c; and also Repub., bk. X, etc.). True philosophy “is properly nothing other than purification from every passion. And temperance, justice, fortitude, and knowledge itself are nothing other than purification” (Phaed., 69 c). Thus metaphysical s. appears coherently as epistemological, aesthetic, moral, and political s. (the State understood as an ethical-religious society, having suprahistorical and suprasocial ends). But its principal difficulty is that it devalues the sensible world without succeeding in explaining it and almost nullifies its reality (the “cave myth” in Book VII of the Republic is significant), while also failing to resolve the anthropological problem, given that man is a unity of soul and body, distinct but not separate. The theological problem too remains compromised: the Demiurge (God) is indeed intelligence, but metaphysically limited by the preexistence of the Ideas and of matter; and he is only the intelligence that “orders” matter according to the model of the Ideas. Plato calls him “best,” “father,” “wise craftsman,” “providence,” etc. (Timaeus, 34b, 42e, 46b, 28c, 29a, 48d, etc.), but he always remains a purely cosmological God. The fact is that the true object of Platonic theology is not the Demiurge but the Intelligible World of the Ideas, that is, the impersonal Divine, toward which all things tend (Phaed., 75b), and not man alone. But apart from these and other difficulties, Plato is the father of s. as such, insofar as he was the first to define its characteristics and its complex problematic; above all, despite the psychism noted above, he discovered once and for all that spirit is essentially intellectual activity, whose object is transcendent Truth or the Idea. Plato is therefore also the founder of true “humanism” in the strongest sense: man is made for intellectual values, and not only Truth but also Good and Beauty are theoretical values, the possession of which is the end of every man’s life and therefore also the end of education, which consequently can only be “humanistic,” that is, spiritualistic.
Aristotle (v.) seeks to eliminate the difficulties of Platonic dualism, but the naturalistic accentuation of his philosophy is to the detriment of the spiritualistic essence imparted to it by his teacher. Nevertheless, with the Stagirite, s. advances on two points: a) the soul is not separated from the body but united to it (the concept of the “synolon”); b) God is Intellect, which is “eternal life,” and therefore God “is a living, eternal, perfect being, so that life and continuous, eternal time belong to him” (Met., 1072 b, 26). Aristotle nevertheless remains: a) obscure and undecided regarding the immortality of the personal soul (it seems that the rational soul is a form immanent in the world, differentiated in individual human beings); and b) he does not transcend the cosmological conception of God, the Unmoved Mover of the physical world (Met., 1072, 3: 1072 b, 14). In Aristotle, however, theism (necessary to s. as such) is more speculatively grounded than in Plato. In this and other respects, the Stagirite represents the summit of pre-Christian thought. Plotinus, in fact, also under the influence of Aristotle and the Stoics, renews the difficulties of Platonic s. without resolving them; indeed, he accentuates the separation between the One and the sensible world as the negativity of matter and compromises the transcendence of God through the principle (pantheistic and acosmistic) of emanation.
Only Christian s. succeeds in resolving the difficulties internal to Platonic-Aristotelian thought. The key to this solution is the principle of creation: nothing precedes or is coeternal with God; the world is God’s creation, as is the spirit of every individual human being. The creator God is personal Intelligence, Spirit who is also Will and therefore Love, in addition to Truth (Ego sum veritas). The theological principle is no longer understood cosmologically, as in Greek philosophy, and therefore s. is grounded in an entirely different way. On the other hand, the creationist principle gives the body (and matter, insofar as it too was created by God with its own order) its positivity and makes it a good, even
if inferior to Spirit; and thus the unity of the human composite too is grounded differently and more soundly. Here s.
finds its entire soul of truth, making use of whatever truth the Greeks had discovered, which is recovered and fulfilled.
The father of Christian s. is s. Agostino (v.). To reason, which asks him, “what do you wish to know?”, Agostino replies: “God and the soul,” and nothing else (Soliloquia, l. I, cap. 3); only insofar as it is referred to man, in whom it finds its meaning, does Agostino concern himself with the problem of the world. Hence the essential «spiritualistic» (and therefore «humanistic» and «Christian», because authentic and complete humanism is Christian alone) character of his thought, and no longer its «cosmological» character. Nor, for Agostino, is the soul essentially voluntas; it is above all intellectus («intellectum valde ama»); and God is the Truth and the illuminating source of the human mens. Man is soul and body; soul in a body to which it gives life: man cannot be understood and therefore defined without taking both into account. Nor is man two separate substances: «man is a substance, composed (constons) of soul and body», and he is man both in mind and in flesh. Yet neither does the essence of the body become that of the soul, nor the essence of the soul that of the body: together they form one man without being the same thing. Clearly, here Agostino, on the basis of the principle of creation, departs from the Platonic position of the two substances and rejects the doctrine of matter as the source of all evils and of the body as evil, while admitting that the body, if not governed by the soul of which it is the instrument, can be an impediment to the realization of the good. Yet man’s perfect state does not lie in the separation of the soul from the body, but in their union and cooperation for the good of the spirit and, after the rupture caused by death, in their reunion through the resurrection of the flesh (De quantitate animae, cap. 12, n. 22; De Trin., l. XV, cap. 7, n. 11; De anima et eius origine, l. IV, cap. 2, n. 3; De cura pro mortuis gerenda, cap. 3, n. 5; Sermo 154, cap. 10, n. 15). Thus another fundamental characteristic of Christian s. is brought to light in contrast with Greek s.: the latter is a doctrine of the disincarnation of the spirit, whereas the former is a doctrine of incarnation, in the philosophical sense (of the soul in the body, to which it is united) and in the theological sense (the incarnation of God in Christ).
It does not seem that s. BADIA, TOMMASO (v.) differs from or dissents from s. Agostino: the world depends on God, who gives it existence (only God exists of himself: Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 3, a. 3-4; q. 44, a. 1); the human composite is the «substantial unity» of soul and body. The intellect is essential to the soul, as the principle of all psychic life; but, since the intellectual function is «superorganic» (its object being intelligible forms), it follows that it can be performed autonomously, that is, even when the soul has become separated from the body. Therefore the soul is superior to the body and can subsist separated from it, even though it aspires to restore union with the body, which, as the faith teaches, will occur through the resurrection of the flesh (Sum. Theol., 1ª, qq. 75-78; De ente et essentia, cap. 6, etc.).
The later forms of s. are either a deviation from or a deepening of this fundamental position of Greek-Christian s. In the Renaissance, s. returns in the form of psychism; Cartesio (v.), also under the influence of scientific doctrines, it appears in the Platonic form of the radical dualism of soul (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), that is, as the dualism of the two «substances», possessing opposed attributes (thought and freedom, on the one hand; extension and mechanism, on the other). Thus emerges the dualism of «nature» and «spirit», of «mechanism» and «life», which torments all modern thought up to Kant. In this sense, with the exception of human consciousnesses and God, the Cartesian conception of nature is materialistic and prepares, although Epicuro (v.) or Cassendi (v.), Enlightenment (v.). On the other hand, Cartesio, through the dualism of the two substances (Principi della filos., l. I, § 53), reopens the problem of the relation between soul and body and prompts, on the one hand, Spinoza (v.) and, on the other, Malebranche (v.) and the other, Leibniz (v.), whose monadism, which intends to be spiritualistic, can also be interpreted in a sense
naturalistic. It must be added immediately, however, that for Leibniz matter is no longer a substance (as it is also for Spinoza), and the world is not an aggregate of mechanical and geometrical phenomena. The human body is composed of an infinity of monads, dominated by the monad-soul (Principi della natura e della grazia, §§ 3–4). Modern rationalism must nevertheless be credited, apart from its errors, with having deepened the spirit as consciousness (cogito), which is not a datum but a principle of knowledge and conscious unification, self-awareness, self-consciousness. Yet rationalism itself, on the one hand, opens the way to the identification of the “intellectual” with the “spiritual” and, on the other, to the conception of the spirit as pure activity (and no longer as substance), consisting, in its essence, in the intellectual bonds or relations by which it unifies experience. This compromises the personal immortality of the soul and opens the way to transcendental idealism, for which it is not individual selves that are immortal, but only eternal Thought or the absolute I. Kant (v.) already limits knowledge of the soul to its functions (to its “transcendentality”) and denies any rational proof of its immortality (Crit. della Rag. pura, pt. II; Dialettica trascendentale, bk. I, ch. 1, § 2); transcendental idealism, from Fichte (v.) GENTILI (v.), which deduces everything, through unconscious and conscious processes, from Absolute Thought, which comes to be in the very becoming of nature and history and is this becoming itself, whose outcome is the conquest that the Absolute achieves of itself in the transparency of the fully unfolded Idea (Hegel), on the one hand, denies the immortality and personality of the soul (“the only immortality that one can conceive ... is the immortality of the transcendental I”: Gentile, Teoria generale dello Spirito come atto puro, Bari 1924, p. 128, 4th ed.) and, on the other, identifies God with the same I think and this with History (absolute immanence). Thus the s. is lost, and the so-called “philosophies of the spirit” ([v.] such as, for example, that of Croce) are, basically, philosophies of nature, once there is adequation between world and spirit, indeed identity (monism). Absolute idealism and absolute positivism, in this sense, are identified with one another. Yet idealism, above all that of Gentile, has deepened the concept of self-consciousness (the Spirit as thinking in act and self-criticism); and this concept, insofar as it contains truth, must be recovered and realized within classical-Christian s., also because of its very notable contributions to pedagogical s., as attested by the Sommario di pedagogia (1912) of Gentile himself. In general, modern thought from Descartes to Hegel and post-Hegelian thought (with the exception of the currents that have remained within the line of classical metaphysics) has lost or altered the concept of spirit and the principles of s., even though pre-Kantian rationalism, Kant’s criticism, and the post-Kantian idealist currents preserved the spirit’s pre-eminence and vigorously maintained that spiritual acts (intellectual and voluntary) cannot at all be fully explained by physiological phenomena, as claimed by the naïve and crude naturalism of antiquity and of modern times. The dualism (of Cartesian origin) between “nature” or mechanism and “spirit” or freedom was also maintained in Kant’s original and profound elaboration of it in the Critica della ragion pratica, which idealism, from Fichte to Gentile, subsequently developed further into a conception in which the I think is assumed as the metaphysical principle of all reality as such. The antithesis between nature and spirit is also taken up, from an original point of view, Bergson (v.) as an opposition between spirit and geometrical necessity and spatiality (L'évolution créatrice, ch. 3), or between “intuition” and “intellect,” or again between “dynamic” morality and religion and “static” morality and religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion).
But classical Christian s. found a further development and realization in nineteenth-century Italian s., from a CAPPONI, GINO (v.), BADIA, TOMMASO (v.), LAMBRUSCHINI, LUIGI (v.), etc., and above all from a ROSMINIANI (v.), Gioberti (v.), who distorts ontologism (v.) pantheism (v.), influenced by Hegel (from the psychological point of view, the contribution of French s. of the same period is noteworthy, especially that of Maine de Biran [v.]; of no theoretical interest is the eclecticism of Cousin [v.] and his school). Rosmini preserves all the essential concepts of s. (the unity of body and spirit and the supremacy and autonomy of the latter; God as creator and transcendent, and the analogical relation between God and the created world, etc.), while at the same time resolving the problems posed by modern thought (and above all those of spirit as consciousness and self-consciousness and of the critical foundation of metaphysics), so that the whole universe, through man, has its summit in God: in striving toward God, man truly loves himself, is free, and actualizes all the infinite power of his spirit. In the inspiration and possession of God lie the ultimate end of integral life and human beatitude, and “here rests the supreme excellence of the created world” (Principi di scienza morale, ch. III, art. IV). Classical-Christian s. underwent a further development, through Augustine and Rosmini, in contemporary Italian Christian s. (v.), in the French “Philosophie de l'esprit” of Lavelle and Le Senne, and also in certain Christian existentialists, such as Marcel.