Actual idealism

thumb|Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who developed actual idealism. It contrasted the [[transcendental idealism of Kant and the absolute idealism of Hegel.]]

Actual idealism is a form of idealism, developed by Giovanni Gentile, that was influenced by the absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel.

Doctrine

Gentile calls his philosophy "actualism" or "actual idealism", because, in it, the only true reality is the pure act of the "thinking that thinks", i.e. self-consciousness in the present moment, in which the spirit that comprises all existing is manifested. Reality lies in the productive and self-creative act of thinking, rather than in the object thought.

The Spirit is Thought, and Thought is a perennial activity in which there is no distinction between subject and object. Gentile therefore opposes any dualism and naturalism claiming the unity of nature and spirit (monism), that is spirit and matter within the thinking consciousness, giving it a gnoseological and ontological primacy. Consciousness is seen as a synthesis of subject and object, synthesis of an act in which the first places the second. Therefore, they do not make sense only spiritualist or only materialist orientations, as it does not have the clear division between spirit and matter of Platonism, as reality is unique: here is evident the influence of Renaissance pantheism and Brunian immanentism, more than Hegelianism

Unlike Benedetto Croce (proponent of absolute historicism or historicist idealism for which all reality is "history" and not an act in the Aristotelian sense) Gentile appreciates Hegel not so much the historicist horizon, as the idealistic system based on consciousness as a "transcendental subject", or the assumption of consciousness as the principle of reality, a position that brings him closer to Fichte. Also according to Gentile there is an error, in Hegel, in the setting of the dialectic, but in a different way from Croce: Hegel would have built his dialectic with elements of the "thought", or that of the determined thought and science. For Gentile, on the other hand, only in the "thinking in action" consists the dialectical self-consciousness that encompasses everything, while the "thought" is an illusory fact.

Taking up Fichte, the philosopher asserts that the spirit is foundational insofar as it is the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, thought in act; the act of thinking thought, or "pure act," is the principle and form of becoming reality, outside of which there is nothing: there are no empirical individuals separate from the absolute I; error, evil, and death have no consistency before Truth and the Eternal; even the past lives only in the present moment of remembrance.

According to Gentile, the dialectic of the pure act is implemented in particular in the opposition between the subjectivity represented by art (thesis) and the objectivity represented by religion (antithesis) to which philosophy (synthesis) provides the solution.

Gentile rejects as abstract the Kantian table of the twelve categories, which depend in fact on the only true concrete judgment constituted by the I think (or aperception):

Empirical self and transcendental self

The transcendental self that operates this synthesis must be distinguished from the empirical self: the latter is an entity different from all the rest as well as from the other empirical selves, the transcendental self is on the contrary the universal subject, which can never be looked at from the outside, because it cannot be the object of our experience, like a show we attend as spectators, otherwise it will no longer be a subject but an object, a self indeed simply empirical.

Even if we presume to objectify the subjective act of the Ego, we would still lower it to one of the many finite objects of knowledge. For this reason it is an act that can never be transcended: its transcendental (not transcendent) nature cannot be understood as a completed act, but only as an "act in progress", that is, an act that is never definitively concluded, constantly actualizing and in continuous becoming.

In this act lies that concrete character that remains for Gentile as a fundamental need also in the act of Education, understood as self-education of the mind based not on the otherness of the teacher and the pupil, but on the unity of the same process that are the school and the life, the Pedagogy and the Philosophy, theory and practice. actualism is the awareness of this center.

Thinking is at the same time an act, a constant process of self-creation or, as Gentile says, of autoctisis, with which by thinking it places itself and the world at the same time, thus becoming aware of itself .

The self-production of the mind as causa sui ipsius, however, is not prior to the act with which thought is thought, but is this same act, because one cannot formulate thoughts without the awareness of formulating. Moreover, the nature of such a self-production is essentially the volition, free creation of the feeling, whose ethics is not external but is one with this self-production, which alienates itself in an external reality to return to itself.

The moment of objectification, of the non-ego, is essential as it constitutes the very thought of the ego; the latter gives himself an object in order to carry out his activity, because otherwise a thought without content could not exist.

The circle of self-awareness: negation and affirmation

The starting point of the circle of self-consciousness is therefore an inactual potentiality, but it does not exist only ideally, because without immediacy mediation is not possible.

That is, the abstract is still a moment of the concrete, and it provides fuel for it to the extent that it is denied. The abstract cannot be combusted once and for all, otherwise becoming, or the dialectic of thinking, would stop. Rather, each time the abstract is overcome in the concrete, the concrete presents itself again as a new abstract, to be overcome endlessly.

Logic of abstract thought

The logic of the concrete therefore does not deny the object, but rather is aware of its abstractness, which it therefore recognizes by admitting alongside the dialectic of thought a logic of the abstract, as its degree or moment in becoming.

The logic of abstract thinking consists of the principle of identity, when being is made the object of thought, becoming identical with itself (A=A).

Being is the negation of thought, because it is external to the actuality of thought, a being that according to Eleatic or naturalistic philosophy would exist even when it is not thought.

Gentile points out that pure (natural) being, understood as the immediate and static "A", cannot be identical to itself, being unthought and therefore unreal, whereas only thought, however abstract, can establish the relation of identity A = A. This relation thinks the being as distinct from the thought, but not separated.

The principle of identity then gives rise to the other determinations of Aristotelian logic such as that of the noncontradiction, of the excluded thirds, of the judgments and of the syllogism, a logic which thus remains fully valued by Gentile, and "remains all solid and alive" as a moment of the logic of the concrete.

Logic of concreteness

The determinateness of the abstract concept must thus be brought back to the concreteness of the actual life of the spirit, since it is proper for spiritual concreteness to create determined and circumscribed forms.

thumb|The original negation of being, understood as a presupposition external to thought and therefore recognized as non-being, implies that the becoming of the act, arising from that negation, produces by itself, within itself, the being that it denies by thinking it, resolving itself in a circle.

The determined forms of thought reality, that is, of "experience," are expressions of the historical, spatiotemporal becoming of the Spirit: their multiplicity is not next to the unity of the Spirit, but belongs to the world as the object of consciousness, which unifies them all in a simple act.

The positivity of the historical determinations is thus reconciled with the original negativity of the self-concept, or self-consciousness of the determined concept. The act of the spirit is "original negativity" in that it is fulfilled at the moment in which it denies being as nature (the simple "A" devoid of connections), that is, it denies something that does not exist (mistakenly believed to exist by naturalism), and in this denial it realizes itself. Pure being is nothing because it is not even that conceptual being posited by abstract thought which, although inactual, provides fuel for the logic of the concrete.

The latter, also called authentic or speculative logic, highlights the continuity of the self through its progressive development in the principles me = me (differentiation in unity) but also me = non-me (unity in difference), for both find their synthesis in the real unity of the concrete and the abstract, of the subject thinking and the object thought.

Identity of history and current events

The transcendental feature of thought is such that the present thought of now includes the past and the future: the now, the present hour of thought is not between before and after, but encompasses the totality of time, and therefore it is eternal, an eternal becoming.

Gentile challenges Croce's distinction between "history that is made" and "history that is thought," between "res gestae" and "historia rerum gestarum," asserting the contemporaneity of history, which "should not be confused with Vico's, which leaves out of itself one that unfolds in time : one where our eternal is the same time considered in the actuality of the spirit".

Historical knowledge consists of the reduction of the multiple to the concrete unity of the act, a synthesis of the opposing theses that conceive the spirit now as a historical dialectic, now as an ahistorical eternity. and Kant's a priori synthesis, though they still admit some realist and transcendent elements beyond the act of thinking. Berkeley, for example, while affirming the dependence of actual on the idea, i.e., that there are no objects outside our perceptions, nevertheless continues to attribute representations of reality to an objective and absolute mind, presupposed to the human mind. For Gentile, on the contrary, the only absolute thought is that which is immanent to becoming and to individual minds, i.e., actual thought.

With German idealism, thought finally becomes aware that there are no other realities outside itself, although Fichte remains in the dualism of the self and the not-self, which is never overcome by the actuality of thought, but only by an infinitely dilated practical act, without prejudice to the opposition between theory and practice. The same opposition is not overcome by Schelling either, if not by an intellectual intuition thought in a dogmatic way and thus always presupposed to the present consciousness.

Finally, Hegel, by tripling the single thought, conceives of logic and nature as something other than spirit, as "thought" rather than as moments of the same thinking act, so that his dialectic result is definitive, immutable, situated at the apex of the development of the mind. For Gentile, becoming is eternal, outside of time; otherwise arriving at such immutability would be at odds with its flow. To this end, Gentile endorses the need, already stated by Spaventa, to "kantianize" Hegel, by bringing the totality of the mind within the unity of the transcendental self.

In the concrete synthesis of this Ego, in its autoctisis outside of which there is nothing, that distinction between theory and praxis falls away, which Gentile reproached Croce for again, who was wrong to put a "logic of fact" in place of the actual logic of the Spirit, basing it on the distinction of the forms of the Spirit (art, philosophy, economics and ethics), which being "distinct" are only empty abstractions, divorced from the spiritual life, whose unity they compromise.

Art, religion and philosophy

Gentile repeatedly reiterates the concreteness of the spiritual life of the thinking act, which unfolds in the dialectical triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis, represented by art, religion and philosophy.

Art (thesis): we have seen how the initial moment of the Spirit's self-production was immediacy, immediate subjectivity, in which art properly consists, which is precisely "the form of subjectivity or, as we also say, of the spirit's immediate individuality".

Gentile recovers the romantic conception of art as pure sentiment, giving it a character of lyrical intuition as De Sanctis and Croce have already done, however, challenging the latter that art is not mediated expression of feeling, but the feeling itself, an active force of the spirit that contains the whole in power. Moreover, art is not to be distinguished from other forms of human creativity as Croce believes, but permeates them all.

Religion (antithesis): opposite to art, religion is the exaltation of the object, disconnected from the subject and therefore from the ideality and knowability of the spirit. As art was consciousness of the subject, religion is therefore consciousness of the object, but without rational mediation, and therefore requires a mystical adherence by the subject who feels like nothing, replacing revelation and grace with knowledge and autonomous will.

Religion, however, is a necessary moment in the development of the spirit that needs to alienate itself in order to become self-aware.

Philosophy (synthesis): the moment of synthesis is thus represented by philosophy, in whose actuality the contradiction of art and religion, thought at the beginning as inactual, is resolved: these are simultaneously integrated in philosophy, which grasps them not as separate moments, but in the oneness of the final self-conscious act.

Gentile recognizes in Christianity the beginning of this process of evolution of the spirit, because it has always privileged the intimacy and the responsibility of the subject starting from the central dogma of the Man-God, which recomposes in unity the separation between the divine spirit and the human spirit.|Giovanni Gentile, Introduzione alla filosofia [1933], Florence, Le Lettere, 1958, p. 33

Actualism and science

Between art and religion lies science, which shares the limits of both without participating in their validity. Like art, science does not deal with the universal but with the particular and, in this sense, it is subjective. On the other hand, being faced with an object that it does not create, whose materiality is opposed to the activity of the spirit, science is in a condition of passivity typical of religion.

Instead of combining the subjectivity of art with the objectivity of religion, as philosophy does, science thus remains at their level of abstraction, which cannot be overcome except in the self-consciousness of the spiritual act, the only one where subject and object concretely coexist.

Gentile rejects the accusation of "hostility to science". To the contrary, he claims to share the desire, proper to a scientific mind, to overcome every limit that is considered inviolable by thought, a desire that finds its foundation in the "fruitfulness" of a philosophy such as the actualist one.

Because actualism denies the existence of immutable realities that oppose thought, every limit to free human creativity falls in the technico-scientific direction.

Ethics and politics

thumb|[[Giovanni Gentile with Benito Mussolini at the seat of the fascist government in the Palace of Venice (1937)]]

Since the divine is immanent to the human, even on the ethical level, the spirit must be affirmed not as an empty universality that suppresses individuality, but as the concrete overcoming of particular interests in a superior ethics that includes them all and at the same time realizes them.

In this sense, Gentile presents himself as "more liberal than Wilson and more socialist than Lenin" ("più liberale di Wilson e più socialista di Lenin, certamente"), defending a human liberty understood as the capacity to universalize oneself by going beyond the limits of one's own empirical singularity.

Criticism

Benedetto Croce objected that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's will. However Schopenhauer "…came to rest in an Absolute which transcends concrete experience … and for (Schopenhauer) the Critical Philosophy was only a prolegomena or propaedeutic to a speculative or 'transcendent' philosophy of the kind which Gentile and Kant are united in opposing", according to H. S. Harris's book on the basic metaphysics of Giovanni Gentile in contrast to that of Schopenhauer.

With actualism, Gentile reforms Hegelian dialectic based on the spiritualist motives of the Italian ontological tradition, reconciling them with the needs of concrete character of Marxist thought. He thus takes to Spaventa and Marx the reference models to reinterpret Hegel, proceeding to one of his "kantianizations", but avoiding falling into materialism.

An opponent of all intellectualism, which he considered detached from reality, he succeeded in postulating a theory of speculative thought that would obtain sufficient consensus to compete with the new waves of positivism (and thus of materialist conceptions of social life) that were clashing in the field of reformist political trends of the time. In 1921, Piero Gobetti wrote of Gentile that he "brought philosophy down from the professorial obscurities into the concreteness of life". However, unlike Benedetto Croce, who permeates Italian culture in general, Gentile had an impact on the specifically philosophical milieu of his time.

His ideas, historically, are decisive for the consolidation of power of the National Fascist Party in Italy, providing a dogmatic basis for relative reforms, as well as the real driving force of the Fascist philosophical doctrine, tending towards the construction of a new humanity. Nevertheless, Gentile claims for his actualism the quintessential quality of positivism, of which it would constitute only the most correct interpretation.

With his conception idealist, Gentile intends to become a prophet of the spirit, a priest of an immanent divinity that religion wrongly considers transcendent, devoid of limits and imperfections.

Among Gentile's most faithful disciples is Ugo Spirito, who defends the immanentism of his philosophy, to the point of reconciling it, after a long philosophical journey, with a vision that elevates science to the rank of cornerstone of the contemporary age. If other thinkers find in Marxism a natural outlet for his immanentism, there are those who, more attentive to the religious and spiritualist motives of his thought, claim the need to open up to transcendence, in particular the idealist Augusto Guzzo, or in the Catholic sphere, Armando Carlini, Michele Federico Sciacca and Augusto del Noce.

Recently, the philosopher Emanuele Severino is keen to highlight "the essential solidarity between actualism and techno-science; on the other hand, the capacity of actualism to carry over the entire Western tradition: this means that Gentile's thought is destined to be recognized as one of the most decisive features of world culture".

References

Citations

Bibliography

In English

The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (Giovanni Gentile; Herbert Wildon Carr, London, Macmillan, 1922)
The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile (Roger W. Holmes, Macmillan, 1937)
The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile: An Inquiry into Gentile's Conception of Experience (Pasquale Romanelli, Birnbaum, 1937)
The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (H. S. Harris, University of Illinois Press, 1960)
Genesis and Structure of Society (Giovanni Gentile; H. Harris, University of Illinois Press, 1966)
The Philosophy of Art (Giovanni Gentile; Giovanni Gullace, Cornell University Press 1972)
Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (A. James Gregor, Transaction Publishers, 2001)

In Italian

Giovanni Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro [1916-1938], Trabant, 2015.
Giovanni Gentile, Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, G. Laterza e Figli, 1923.
Giovanni Gentile, la vita e il pensiero, Fondazione Giovanni Gentile per gli studi filosofici, Sansoni, Firenze 1972.
Emilio Chiocchetti, La filosofia di Giovanni Gentile, Vita e pensiero, Milano 1922.
Vittorio Agosti, Filosofia e religione nell'attualismo gentiliano, Paideia, Brescia 1978,
Antonio Cammarana, Proposizioni sulla filosofia di Giovanni Gentile / prefazione del prof. sen. Armando Plebe, Roma: Gruppo parlamentare MSI-DN - Senato della Repubblica, 1975, ITICCUSBL0559261
Fortunato Aloi, Giovanni Gentile ed attualità dell'attualismo, Pellegrini editore, 2004.
Biagio de Giovanni, Disputa sul divenire. Gentile e Severino, Editoriale Scientifica, 2013.
Luca Canapini, La forma dell'arte nella filosofia di Giovanni Gentile, Carabba, 2013.
Opere complete di G. Gentile, Fondazione Giovanni Gentile per gli studi filosofici, Florence: Sansoni, 1955.

;In German

Der aktuale Idealismus (Giovanni Gentile, Mohr Siebeck, 1931)
Die Staatsphilosophie Giovanni Gentiles und die Versuche ihrer Verwirklichung im faschistischen Italien (Sebastian Schattenfroh, Lang, Peter, GmbH, Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1999)