Giovanni Gentile
Encyclopedia
Giovanni Gentile was an Italian
neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce
. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism
', and ghostwrote
A Doctrine of Fascism
(1932) for Benito Mussolini
. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism
.
, Sicily
. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini
, Gioberti
, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, “self-construction”, but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought — namely Karl Marx
, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche
, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista.
He won the fierce competition and became one of the four exceptional students of the mythic Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Humanities
.
During his academic career Gentile was a Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo
(March 27, 1910), Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa
(August 9, 1914), Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome (November 11, 1917), professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome (1926), Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
(1928-1932), Director of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
(1932-1943) and Vice President of Bocconi University
in Milan (1934 to 1944).
In 1923, he was the Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini
, as which he effected the “Riforma Gentile” — a great and deep reformation of the secondary school system, that had a long-lasting influence upon Italian education. He formulated the important works The Theory of Mind as Pure Act
(1916) and Logic as Theory of Knowledge (1917), with which he devised Actual Idealism
, a unified metaphysical
system reinforcing his sentiments that philosophy isolated from life, and life isolated from philosophy, are but two identical modes of backward cultural bankruptcy. For Gentile, that theory realised how philosophy could directly influence, mould, and penetrate life: philosophy could govern life.
His philosophic system viewed thought as all-embracing: no-one could actually leave his or her sphere of thought, nor exceed his or her thought. Reality
was unthinkable, except in relation to the activity by means of which it becomes thinkable, positing that as a unity — held in the active subject and the discrete abstract
phenomena
that reality comprehends — wherein each phenomenon, when truly realised, was centered within that unity; therefore, it was innately spiritual
, transcendent
, and immanent
, to all possible things in contact with the unity. Gentile used that philosophic frame to systematize every item of interest that now was subject to the rule of absolute self-identification — thus rendering as correct every consequence of the hypothesis
. The resultant philosophy can be interpreted as an idealist
foundation for Legal Naturalism
.
Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as 'the philosopher of Fascism
'; moreover, he was the ghostwriter
of the essay
A Doctrine of Fascism
(1932), by Benito Mussolini
. It was first published in 1932, in the Italian Encyclopedia, (edited by Gentile), wherein he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism
, Philosopher Kings, the abolition of the parliament
ary system, and autarky
. He also wrote the Manifesto of the Italian Fascist Intellectuals, signed by many writers and intellectual
s, including Luigi Pirandello
.
Besides being minister of education, later, he was integral to the Fascist Grand Council of the Italian Fascist régime, remained loyal to Mussolini after the establishment of the Republic of Salò
(despite having criticized the anti-Jewish laws), and accepted a government appointment. In 1944, a group of anti-fascist partisans
, led by Bruno Fanciullacci, killed ‘the philosopher of Fascism’ as he returned from the Prefecture in Florence
, where he had argued for the release of anti-fascist intellectuals.
In the event, Giovanni Gentile had so firmly believed that the philosophic concreteness of Fascism possessed a dialectical intelligence that surpassed intellectual scrutiny, that he presumed that intellectual opposition would only reinforce, and thus give credence to, the truth of the superiority of Fascism as a superior, liberally-thinking polity
.
and epistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection of individualism
, acceptance of collectivism
, with the state
as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality no meaning outside of the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism
).
The conceptual relationship between Gentile's Actual Idealism and his fascism is not evident. The supposed relationship does not appear to be one of logical deducibility. Actual Idealism does not entail a fascist ideology in any rigorous sense. Gentile, who enjoyed fruitful intellectual relations with Croce from 1899 and particularly during their joint editorship of La Critica, 1903–22, broke philosophically and politically from Croce in the early 1920s. Croce assesses the philosophical disagreement in Una discussione tra filosofi amici in Conversazioni Critiche, II.
Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds weren't to be considered as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed
by all former kinds of Government, including capitalism
and communism
; and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of Corporative Syndicalism, a fascist state, could defeat these problems which are made from reifying as an external reality that which is in fact, to Gentile, only a thinking reality. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Gentile postulated the opposite, that the subject is the concrete and the object is an abstraction (or rather, that what was conventionally dubbed "subject" is in fact only conditional object, and that the true subject is the 'act of' being or essence of the object).
Gentile was a notable philosophical theorist of his time throughout Europe, since having developed his 'Actual Idealism' system of Idealism
, sometimes called 'Actualism.' It was especially in which his ideas put subject to the position of a transcending truth above positivism
that garnered attention; by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's mind in any real sense; to Gentile even the analogy between the function & location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body were a consistent creation of the mind (and not brain; which was a creation of the mind and not the other way around). An example of Actual Idealism
in Theology
is the idea that although man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make God any less real in any sense possible as far as it is not presupposed to exist as abstraction and except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (i.e. being invented apart from the thinking making it) are presupposed. Benedetto Croce
objected that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer
's will
.
Therefore Gentile proposed a form of what he called 'absolute Immanentism' in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process. Many times accused of solipsism
, Gentile maintained his philosophy to be a Humanism
that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was colligate in perception; the self's human thinking, in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore not modeled as objects to one's own thinking. Whereas solipsism would feel trapped in realization of its solitude, Actualism rejects such a privation and is an expression of the only freedom which is possible within objective contingencies, where the transcendental self does not even exist as an object, and the dialectical co-substantiation of others necessary to understand the empirical self are felt as true others when found to be the unrelativistic subjectivity of that whole self and essentially unified with the spirit of such higher self in actu, where others can be truly known, rather than thought as windowless monads.
Gentile's immanentist philosophy was divergent from others in that while he put the center of existence and all spirituality in the individual, he perceived the consequence of this to mean complete selfless immersion and relegation to the social plane in action as being the truest vanguard of the will of an individual so understood, when rightly and purely expressed. This is because to Gentile social reality was not exterior to the individual, but was a qualified extension of the individual by the fact that it was the individual who recognized social reality and all its implications and qualifications through no means beyond the mind of himself. Though he may imagine he does so through his senses, which are again only external in so far as the mind internally apprehends them to be. This act constituting the full extent of what represents external character, continues to be for Gentile a product solely within the apprehension that transcends exterior being. Doing so by virtue that such immanent apprehension is what exclusively must be referred to when maintaining the basis of what seems external to the individual.
Gentile maintained the need for an intelligent opposition to the intellectualizing of systems into being, divorced from practice, which he would classify 'abstract' and for that reason unwieldy if not unworkable. Though this stand is cited by his terminology as "anti-intellectualism" he attributes to it still the factor of intelligence. Meaning 'intelligence' is as it penetrates, and not as it is object, i.e. not as it is when in the "intellectual" tense of the word. In the common meaning of this term outside of Gentiles highly analytic interpretation of it to his philosophy, Gentiles philosophy in fact contains all of the criteria in regard to comporting a favorable position toward having "intellectual" pursuits.
Gentile took the stand against psychology
and psycho-analysis that one cannot abstract (i.e. make object out of) the source that creates its own surrounding reality, as one does by his own philosophy, and that any empirical observations of behavioral anthropology appear true because empiricalism always adheres to its own laws, being a closed system it is true within its own considered vacuum. Rather than look to the external for the source of one's mentality, Gentile held that any colourations on what the external first manifests as are initially created within the self, and therefore the external is a product of one's psychology and not the other way around.
Gentile's theory may be considered an extreme form of Occam's Razor
, though it can appear to common sense to defy Occam's Razor outright by the complex thinking involved to relate with his theory. Gentile however deduced that common sense in considering material reality was to him not philosophical because it was not self-critical of its sensory presuppositions. To Gentile, making a thought category of his theory itself defied it by turning it into object, as any such idea of the philosophy that was not kept in subject or truly 'actual' could not be Actual Idealism.
One of his most important works is Genesi e Struttura della Società in which he argues that the individual is an abstraction originating from analysis of society. One of the consequences he draws is that the state and the individual are one and the same and that their division is an example of formal abstraction. The work was written after Mussolini had been deposed by the Fascist Grand Council but before the proclamation of the armistice between Italy
and the Allies on September 8, 1943 and the Republic of Salò on September 14, 1943.
and dialectical opposition intact. The fact that Mussolini gave credence to Gentile's view points via Gentile's authorship helped with an official consideration, even though the 'problem of the party' continued to exist for Mussolini himself as well.
Gentile placed himself in the Marxist tradition in many respects, but he believed that Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making. To Gentile, Marx made the dialectic into external object, and therefore abstracted it by making it part of some process that theoretically exists of outward matter & material. The dialectic to Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking. Dialectic was to Gentile concrete subject and not abstract object
. This Gentile expounded by how humans think in forms wherein one side of a dual opposite could not be thought of without its complement.
"Upward" wouldn't be known without "downward" and "heat" couldn't be known without "cold", while each are opposites they are co-dependent for either one's realization: these were creations that existed as dialectic only in human thinking and couldn't be confirmed outside of which, and especially could not be said to exist in a condition external to human thought like independent matter & a world outside of personal subjectivity or as an empirical reality when not conceived in unity and from the standpoint of the human mind.
To Gentile, Marx externalizing the dialectic was essentially a fetishistic mysticism. Though when viewed externally thus, it followed that Marx could then make claims to the effect of what state or condition the dialectic objectively existed in history, a posteriori of where any individuals opinion was while comporting oneself to the totalized whole of society. i.e. people themselves could by such a view be ideologically 'backwards' and left behind from the current state of the dialectic and not themselves be part of what is actively creating the dialectic as-it-is.
Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no 'positive' independently existing dialectical object. Rather, the dialectic was natural to the state, as-it-is. Meaning that the interests composing the state are composing the dialectic by their living organic process of holding oppositional views within that state, and unified therein. It being the mean condition of those interests as ever they exist. Even criminality, is unified as a necessarily dialectic to be subsumed into the state and a creation and natural outlet of the dialectic of the positive state as ever it is.
This view justified the corporative system, wherein the individualized and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personably incorporated into the state, each to be considered a bureaucratic branch of the state itself and given official leverage. Gentile, rather than believing the private to be swallowed synthetically within the public as Marx would have it in his objective dialectic, believed that public & private were a priori identified with each other in an active & subjective dialectic: one could not be subsumed fully into the other as they already are beforehand the same. In such a manner each is the other after their own fashion & from their respective, relative, and reciprocal, position. Yet both constitute the state itself and neither are free from it, nothing ever being truly free from it, the state existing as an eternal condition and not an objective, abstract collection of atomistic values and facts of the particulars about what is positively governing the people at any given time.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
', and ghostwrote
Ghostwriter
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written...
A Doctrine of Fascism
Doctrine of Fascism
"The Doctrine of Fascism" is an essay written by Giovanni Gentile, but credit is given to Benito Mussolini. It was first published in the Enciclopedia Italiana of 1932, as the first section of a lengthy entry on "Fascismo"...
(1932) for Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism was a form of idealism, developed by Giovanni Gentile, that grew into a 'grounded' idealism, contrasting the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant, and the Absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel...
.
Life and thought
Giovanni Gentile was born in CastelvetranoCastelvetrano
Castelvetrano is a town and comune in the province of Trapani, Sicily, Italy. The archeological site of Selinunte is located within the territory of the comune. It was the birthplace of Giovanni Gentile, the key philosopher of the Fascist movement in Italy.The town is predominantly a farming town,...
, Sicily
Sicily
Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...
. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati
Blessed Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was an Italian Roman Catholic priest and philosopher. He founded the Rosminians, officially the Institute of Charity or Societas a charitate nuncupata.-Biography:...
, Gioberti
Vincenzo Gioberti
thumb|250px|Vincenzo Gioberti.Vincenzo Gioberti was an Italian philosopher, publicist and politician.-Biography:Gioberti was born in Turin....
, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, “self-construction”, but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought — namely Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista.
He won the fierce competition and became one of the four exceptional students of the mythic Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, also known in Italian as Scuola Normale , is a public higher learning institution in Italy. It was founded in 1810, by Napoleonic decree, as a branch of the École Normale Supérieure of Paris...
, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
.
During his academic career Gentile was a Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo
University of Palermo
The University of Palermo is a university located in Palermo, Italy, and founded in 1806. It is organized in 12 Faculties.-History:The University of Palermo was officially founded in 1806, although its earliest roots date back to 1498 when medicine and law were taught there...
(March 27, 1910), Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa
University of Pisa
The University of Pisa , located in Pisa, Tuscany, is one of the oldest universities in Italy. It was formally founded on September 3, 1343 by an edict of Pope Clement VI, although there had been lectures on law in Pisa since the 11th century...
(August 9, 1914), Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome (November 11, 1917), professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome (1926), Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, also known in Italian as Scuola Normale , is a public higher learning institution in Italy. It was founded in 1810, by Napoleonic decree, as a branch of the École Normale Supérieure of Paris...
(1928-1932), Director of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, also known in Italian as Scuola Normale , is a public higher learning institution in Italy. It was founded in 1810, by Napoleonic decree, as a branch of the École Normale Supérieure of Paris...
(1932-1943) and Vice President of Bocconi University
Bocconi University
Bocconi University is a private university located in central Milan, beside Parco Ravizza. Bocconi provides undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education, in addition to a range of double degree programs, in the fields of economics, management, finance and law. According to many university...
in Milan (1934 to 1944).
In 1923, he was the Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
, as which he effected the “Riforma Gentile” — a great and deep reformation of the secondary school system, that had a long-lasting influence upon Italian education. He formulated the important works The Theory of Mind as Pure Act
Actus purus
Actus Purus is a term employed in scholastic philosophy to express the absolute perfection of God. It literally means, "pure act."Created beings have potentiality that is not actuality, imperfections as well as perfection. Only God is simultaneously all that He can be, infinitely real and...
(1916) and Logic as Theory of Knowledge (1917), with which he devised Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism was a form of idealism, developed by Giovanni Gentile, that grew into a 'grounded' idealism, contrasting the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant, and the Absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel...
, a unified metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
system reinforcing his sentiments that philosophy isolated from life, and life isolated from philosophy, are but two identical modes of backward cultural bankruptcy. For Gentile, that theory realised how philosophy could directly influence, mould, and penetrate life: philosophy could govern life.
His philosophic system viewed thought as all-embracing: no-one could actually leave his or her sphere of thought, nor exceed his or her thought. Reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
was unthinkable, except in relation to the activity by means of which it becomes thinkable, positing that as a unity — held in the active subject and the discrete abstract
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
phenomena
Phenomenon
A phenomenon , plural phenomena, is any observable occurrence. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as 'appearances' or 'experiences'...
that reality comprehends — wherein each phenomenon, when truly realised, was centered within that unity; therefore, it was innately spiritual
Supernatural
The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
, transcendent
Transcendence (philosophy)
In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages...
, and immanent
Immanence
Immanence refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence, in which the divine is seen to be manifested in or encompassing of the material world. It is often contrasted with theories of transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be outside the material world...
, to all possible things in contact with the unity. Gentile used that philosophic frame to systematize every item of interest that now was subject to the rule of absolute self-identification — thus rendering as correct every consequence of the hypothesis
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...
. The resultant philosophy can be interpreted as an idealist
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
foundation for Legal Naturalism
Legal naturalism
Legal naturalism is a term coined by Olufemi Taiwo to describe a current in the social philosophy of Karl Marx which can be interpreted as one of Natural Law. Taiwo considered it the manifestation of Natural Law in a dialectical materialist context.-Books:...
.
Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as 'the philosopher of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
'; moreover, he was the ghostwriter
Ghostwriter
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written...
of the essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
A Doctrine of Fascism
Doctrine of Fascism
"The Doctrine of Fascism" is an essay written by Giovanni Gentile, but credit is given to Benito Mussolini. It was first published in the Enciclopedia Italiana of 1932, as the first section of a lengthy entry on "Fascismo"...
(1932), by Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
. It was first published in 1932, in the Italian Encyclopedia, (edited by Gentile), wherein he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism
Corporatism
Corporatism, also known as corporativism, is a system of economic, political, or social organization that involves association of the people of society into corporate groups, such as agricultural, business, ethnic, labor, military, patronage, or scientific affiliations, on the basis of common...
, Philosopher Kings, the abolition of the parliament
Parliament of Italy
The Parliament of Italy is the national parliament of Italy. It is a bicameral legislature with 945 elected members . The Chamber of Deputies, with 630 members is the lower house. The Senate of the Republic is the upper house and has 315 members .Since 2005, a party list electoral law is being...
ary system, and autarky
Autarky
Autarky is the quality of being self-sufficient. Usually the term is applied to political states or their economic policies. Autarky exists whenever an entity can survive or continue its activities without external assistance. Autarky is not necessarily economic. For example, a military autarky...
. He also wrote the Manifesto of the Italian Fascist Intellectuals, signed by many writers and intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
s, including Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
.
Besides being minister of education, later, he was integral to the Fascist Grand Council of the Italian Fascist régime, remained loyal to Mussolini after the establishment of the Republic of Salò
Italian Social Republic
The Italian Social Republic was a puppet state of Nazi Germany led by the "Duce of the Nation" and "Minister of Foreign Affairs" Benito Mussolini and his Republican Fascist Party. The RSI exercised nominal sovereignty in northern Italy but was largely dependent on the Wehrmacht to maintain control...
(despite having criticized the anti-Jewish laws), and accepted a government appointment. In 1944, a group of anti-fascist partisans
Italian resistance movement
The Italian resistance is the umbrella term for the various partisan forces formed by pro-Allied Italians during World War II...
, led by Bruno Fanciullacci, killed ‘the philosopher of Fascism’ as he returned from the Prefecture in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, where he had argued for the release of anti-fascist intellectuals.
In the event, Giovanni Gentile had so firmly believed that the philosophic concreteness of Fascism possessed a dialectical intelligence that surpassed intellectual scrutiny, that he presumed that intellectual opposition would only reinforce, and thus give credence to, the truth of the superiority of Fascism as a superior, liberally-thinking polity
Polity
Polity is a form of government Aristotle developed in his search for a government that could be most easily incorporated and used by the largest amount of people groups, or states...
.
Phases of his thought
There are a number of developments within his thought and career which defined his philosophy.- The discovery of Actual Idealism in his work Theory of the Pure Act (1903)
- The political favour he felt for the invasion of LibyaLibyaLibya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
(1911) and the entry of Italy into World War IWorld War IWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
(1915) - The dispute with Benedetto Croce over the historic inevitability of Fascism.
- His role as education minister (1923)
- His belief that Fascism could be made to be subservient to his thought and the gathering of influence through the work of such students as Ugo Spirito.
Philosophy
Benedetto Croce wrote that Gentile "...holds the honor of having been the most rigorous neo–Hegelian in the entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy." His philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding of ontologyOntology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
and epistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection of individualism
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
, acceptance of collectivism
Collectivism
Collectivism is any philosophic, political, economic, mystical or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human in some collective group and the priority of group goals over individual goals. Collectivists usually focus on community, society, or nation...
, with the state
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...
as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality no meaning outside of the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
).
The conceptual relationship between Gentile's Actual Idealism and his fascism is not evident. The supposed relationship does not appear to be one of logical deducibility. Actual Idealism does not entail a fascist ideology in any rigorous sense. Gentile, who enjoyed fruitful intellectual relations with Croce from 1899 and particularly during their joint editorship of La Critica, 1903–22, broke philosophically and politically from Croce in the early 1920s. Croce assesses the philosophical disagreement in Una discussione tra filosofi amici in Conversazioni Critiche, II.
Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds weren't to be considered as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed
Reflexivity (social theory)
Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that does not render both functions causes and effects...
by all former kinds of Government, including capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
; and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of Corporative Syndicalism, a fascist state, could defeat these problems which are made from reifying as an external reality that which is in fact, to Gentile, only a thinking reality. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Gentile postulated the opposite, that the subject is the concrete and the object is an abstraction (or rather, that what was conventionally dubbed "subject" is in fact only conditional object, and that the true subject is the 'act of' being or essence of the object).
Gentile was a notable philosophical theorist of his time throughout Europe, since having developed his 'Actual Idealism' system of Idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
, sometimes called 'Actualism.' It was especially in which his ideas put subject to the position of a transcending truth above positivism
Verstehen
Verstehen is an ordinary German word with exactly the same meaning as the English word "understand". However, since the late 19th century in the context of German philosophy and social sciences, it has also been used in the special sense of "interpretive or participatory examination" of social...
that garnered attention; by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's mind in any real sense; to Gentile even the analogy between the function & location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body were a consistent creation of the mind (and not brain; which was a creation of the mind and not the other way around). An example of Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism was a form of idealism, developed by Giovanni Gentile, that grew into a 'grounded' idealism, contrasting the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant, and the Absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel...
in Theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
is the idea that although man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make God any less real in any sense possible as far as it is not presupposed to exist as abstraction and except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (i.e. being invented apart from the thinking making it) are presupposed. Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
objected that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
's will
Will (philosophy)
Will, in philosophical discussions, consonant with a common English usage, refers to a property of the mind, and an attribute of acts intentionally performed. Actions made according to a person's will are called "willing" or "voluntary" and sometimes pejoratively "willful"...
.
Therefore Gentile proposed a form of what he called 'absolute Immanentism' in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process. Many times accused of solipsism
Solipsism
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
, Gentile maintained his philosophy to be a Humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was colligate in perception; the self's human thinking, in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore not modeled as objects to one's own thinking. Whereas solipsism would feel trapped in realization of its solitude, Actualism rejects such a privation and is an expression of the only freedom which is possible within objective contingencies, where the transcendental self does not even exist as an object, and the dialectical co-substantiation of others necessary to understand the empirical self are felt as true others when found to be the unrelativistic subjectivity of that whole self and essentially unified with the spirit of such higher self in actu, where others can be truly known, rather than thought as windowless monads.
Gentile's immanentist philosophy was divergent from others in that while he put the center of existence and all spirituality in the individual, he perceived the consequence of this to mean complete selfless immersion and relegation to the social plane in action as being the truest vanguard of the will of an individual so understood, when rightly and purely expressed. This is because to Gentile social reality was not exterior to the individual, but was a qualified extension of the individual by the fact that it was the individual who recognized social reality and all its implications and qualifications through no means beyond the mind of himself. Though he may imagine he does so through his senses, which are again only external in so far as the mind internally apprehends them to be. This act constituting the full extent of what represents external character, continues to be for Gentile a product solely within the apprehension that transcends exterior being. Doing so by virtue that such immanent apprehension is what exclusively must be referred to when maintaining the basis of what seems external to the individual.
Gentile maintained the need for an intelligent opposition to the intellectualizing of systems into being, divorced from practice, which he would classify 'abstract' and for that reason unwieldy if not unworkable. Though this stand is cited by his terminology as "anti-intellectualism" he attributes to it still the factor of intelligence. Meaning 'intelligence' is as it penetrates, and not as it is object, i.e. not as it is when in the "intellectual" tense of the word. In the common meaning of this term outside of Gentiles highly analytic interpretation of it to his philosophy, Gentiles philosophy in fact contains all of the criteria in regard to comporting a favorable position toward having "intellectual" pursuits.
Gentile took the stand against psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and psycho-analysis that one cannot abstract (i.e. make object out of) the source that creates its own surrounding reality, as one does by his own philosophy, and that any empirical observations of behavioral anthropology appear true because empiricalism always adheres to its own laws, being a closed system it is true within its own considered vacuum. Rather than look to the external for the source of one's mentality, Gentile held that any colourations on what the external first manifests as are initially created within the self, and therefore the external is a product of one's psychology and not the other way around.
Gentile's theory may be considered an extreme form of Occam's Razor
Occam's razor
Occam's razor, also known as Ockham's razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae , is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.-Overview:The principle is often summarized as "simpler explanations...
, though it can appear to common sense to defy Occam's Razor outright by the complex thinking involved to relate with his theory. Gentile however deduced that common sense in considering material reality was to him not philosophical because it was not self-critical of its sensory presuppositions. To Gentile, making a thought category of his theory itself defied it by turning it into object, as any such idea of the philosophy that was not kept in subject or truly 'actual' could not be Actual Idealism.
One of his most important works is Genesi e Struttura della Società in which he argues that the individual is an abstraction originating from analysis of society. One of the consequences he draws is that the state and the individual are one and the same and that their division is an example of formal abstraction. The work was written after Mussolini had been deposed by the Fascist Grand Council but before the proclamation of the armistice between Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and the Allies on September 8, 1943 and the Republic of Salò on September 14, 1943.
Gentile's definition of and vision for Fascism
Gentile sought to make his philosophy become the basis of Fascism in much the same manner Marx had developed his philosophy as the basis of Communism. However, with Gentile & with Fascism, the 'problem of the party' existed, and existed by the fact that the Fascist party came to be organically rather than from a tract or pre-made doctrine of thought. This complicated the matter for Gentile as it left no consensus to any way of thinking among Fascists, but ironically this aspect was to Gentile's view of how a state or party doctrine should live out its existence: with natural organic growthOrganicism
Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. By definition it is close to holism. Plato, Hobbes or Constantin Brunner are examples of such philosophical thought....
and dialectical opposition intact. The fact that Mussolini gave credence to Gentile's view points via Gentile's authorship helped with an official consideration, even though the 'problem of the party' continued to exist for Mussolini himself as well.
Gentile placed himself in the Marxist tradition in many respects, but he believed that Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making. To Gentile, Marx made the dialectic into external object, and therefore abstracted it by making it part of some process that theoretically exists of outward matter & material. The dialectic to Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking. Dialectic was to Gentile concrete subject and not abstract object
Abstract object
An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing . In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta An abstract object is an...
. This Gentile expounded by how humans think in forms wherein one side of a dual opposite could not be thought of without its complement.
"Upward" wouldn't be known without "downward" and "heat" couldn't be known without "cold", while each are opposites they are co-dependent for either one's realization: these were creations that existed as dialectic only in human thinking and couldn't be confirmed outside of which, and especially could not be said to exist in a condition external to human thought like independent matter & a world outside of personal subjectivity or as an empirical reality when not conceived in unity and from the standpoint of the human mind.
To Gentile, Marx externalizing the dialectic was essentially a fetishistic mysticism. Though when viewed externally thus, it followed that Marx could then make claims to the effect of what state or condition the dialectic objectively existed in history, a posteriori of where any individuals opinion was while comporting oneself to the totalized whole of society. i.e. people themselves could by such a view be ideologically 'backwards' and left behind from the current state of the dialectic and not themselves be part of what is actively creating the dialectic as-it-is.
Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no 'positive' independently existing dialectical object. Rather, the dialectic was natural to the state, as-it-is. Meaning that the interests composing the state are composing the dialectic by their living organic process of holding oppositional views within that state, and unified therein. It being the mean condition of those interests as ever they exist. Even criminality, is unified as a necessarily dialectic to be subsumed into the state and a creation and natural outlet of the dialectic of the positive state as ever it is.
This view justified the corporative system, wherein the individualized and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personably incorporated into the state, each to be considered a bureaucratic branch of the state itself and given official leverage. Gentile, rather than believing the private to be swallowed synthetically within the public as Marx would have it in his objective dialectic, believed that public & private were a priori identified with each other in an active & subjective dialectic: one could not be subsumed fully into the other as they already are beforehand the same. In such a manner each is the other after their own fashion & from their respective, relative, and reciprocal, position. Yet both constitute the state itself and neither are free from it, nothing ever being truly free from it, the state existing as an eternal condition and not an objective, abstract collection of atomistic values and facts of the particulars about what is positively governing the people at any given time.
Works
| Writings of Giovanni Gentile (to 1935) |
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*Delle Commedie di Antonfranceso Grazzi, detto "Il Lasca" (1896)
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| Complete writings of Giovanni Gentile as published by Le Lettere |
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Opere sistematicheI-II. Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica. (Vol. I: Pedagogia generale; vol. II: Didattica). III. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro. IV. I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto. V-VI. Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (voll. 2). VII. La riforma dell'educazione. VIII. La filosofia dell'arte. IX. Genesi e struttura della società. Opere storicheX. Storia della filosofia. Dalle origini a Platone.XI. Storia della filosofia italiana (fino a Lorenzo Valla). XII. I problemi della Scolastica e il pensiero italiano. XIII. Studi su Dante. XIV Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento. XV. Studi sul Rinascimento. XVI. Studi vichiani. XVII. L'eredità di Vittorio Alfieri. XVIII-XIX. Storia della filosofia italiana dal Genovesi al Galluppi (voll. 2). XX-XXI. Albori della nuova Italia (voll. 2). XXII. Vincenzo Cuoco. Studi e appunti. XXIII. Gino Capponi e la cultura toscana nel secolo decimonono. XXIV. Manzoni e Leopardi. XXV. Rosmini e Gioberti. XXVI. I profeti del Risorgimento italiano. XXVII. La riforma della dialettica hegeliana. XXVIII. La filosofia di Marx. XXIX. Bertrando Spaventa. XXX. Il tramonto della cultura siciliana. XXXI-XXXIV. Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia. (Vol. I: I platonici; vol. II: I positivisti; voll. III e IV: I neokantiani e gli hegeliani). XXXV. Il modernismo e i rapporti fra religione e filosofia. Opere varieXXXVI. Introduzione alla filosofia.XXXVII. Discorsi di religione. XXXVIII. Difesa della filosofia. XXXIX. Educazione e scuola laica. XL. La nuova scuola media. XLI. La riforma della scuola in Italia. XLII. Preliminari allo studio del fanciullo. XLIII. Guerra e fede. XLIV. Dopo la vittoria. XLV-XLVI. Politica e cultura (voll. 2). FragmentsXLVII-XLVIII. Frammenti di estetica e di teoria della storia (voll. 2).XLIX-L. Frammenti di critica e storia letteraria. LI-LII. Frammenti di filosofia. LIII-LV. Frammenti di storia della filosofia. Letter collectionsI-II. Carteggio Gentile-Jaja (voll. 2)III-VII. Lettere a Benedetto Croce (voll. 5) VIII. Carteggio Gentile-D'Ancona IX. Carteggio Gentile-Omodeo X. Carteggio Gentile-Maturi XI. Carteggio Gentile-Pintor XII. Carteggio Gentile-Chiavacci XIII. Carteggio Gentile-Calogero XIV. Carteggio Gentile-Donati Rare and unpublished1. Eraclito. Vita e frammenti.2. La filosofia della storia. Saggi e inediti. |
Works about Giovanni Gentile in English
- A. James GregorA. James GregorA. James Gregor is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley who is well known for his research on fascism, Marxism, and national security...
, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (Transaction Publishers, 2001). ISBN 0-7658-0072-1 - A. James GregorA. James GregorA. James Gregor is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley who is well known for his research on fascism, Marxism, and national security...
, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works by Giovanni Gentile (Transaction Publishers, 2004). ISBN 0-7658-0577-4 - H.S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (U of Illinois Press, 1966).
- M. E. Moss, Mussolini's Fascist Philosopher, Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered (Lang, 2004). ISBN 0-8204-6838-X
- William A. Smith, Giovanni Gentile on the existence of God (Beatrice-Naewolaerts, 1970)
Works about Giovanni Gentile in Italian
- Giovanni Gentile (Augusto del Noce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990)
- Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo (Salvatore Natoli, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989)
- Giovanni Gentile (Antimo Negri, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975)
- Faremo una grande università: Girolamo Palazzina-Giovanni Gentile; Un epistolario (1930-1938), a cura di Marzio Achille Romano (Milano: Edizioni Giuridiche Economiche Aziendali dell'Università Bocconi e Giuffré editori S.p.A., 1999)
- Parlato, Giuseppe. "Giovanni Gentile: From the Risorgimento to Fascism." Trans. Stefano Maranzana. TELOSTELOS (journal)Telos is an academic journal published in the United States. It was founded in May 1968 to provide the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective. It sought to expand the Husserlian diagnosis of "the crisis of European sciences" to prefigure a particular program of social reconstruction...
133 (Winter 2005): pp. 75–94.