Giovanni Gentile

Life and thought

Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. Gentile was inspired by such Italian thinkers as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi or self-construction, but was just as strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought. Nietzsche too, played an influence on Gentile, as can be seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista. Logic as Theory of Knowledge (1917), Gentile devised what he called Actual Idealism, a unified metaphysical system reinforcing his sentiments that philosophy when isolated from life, and alternately, life when isolated from philosophy are two modes of the same backwards cultural bankruptcy.

The theory of his system took thought to the all-embracing, to whence he claimed none could actually leave their sphere of thinking or exceed their own thought. Reality to Gentile then could not be thinkable except in relation to the activity by means where it becomes thinkable.

Gentile, described both by himself and Mussolini as 'the philosopher of Fascism', ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism for Benito Mussolini.

Gentile had believed so firmly in the philosophical concreteness of Fascism as having a dialectical intelligence surpassing intellectual scrutiny, that he presumed intellectual opposition could only reinforce and give credence to help the truth of his conception of Fascism as a superior and liberally thinking polity.

Philosophy

Gentile's philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding of ontology 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).

Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds weren't to be given sanction as existing independently from each other; capitalism, communism, and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of Corporative Syndicalism, a Fascist state, could defeat these problems made from reifing as an external that which is in fact to Gentile only a thinking reality. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see conditional subject as abstract and object as concrete, Gentile postulated the opposite, that subject was the concrete and objectification was abstraction (or rather;

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;

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.

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. 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. Rather than look to the external for the source of ones 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 ones 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. 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.

Complete writings of Giovanni Gentile as published by Le Lettere

Opere sistematiche

I-II. I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto. Genesi e struttura della società. I problemi della Scolastica e il pensiero italiano. Storia della filosofia italiana dal Genovesi al Galluppi (voll. Studi e appunti. Gino Capponi e la cultura toscana nel secolo decimonono. Manzoni e Leopardi. Rosmini e Gioberti. III e IV: I neokantiani e gli hegeliani). Il modernismo e i rapporti fra religione e filosofia. Educazione e scuola laica. La riforma della scuola in Italia. Guerra e fede. Politica e cultura (voll. Frammenti di estetica e di teoria della storia (voll. Frammenti di critica e storia letteraria. Frammenti di storia della filosofia. Vita e frammenti. La filosofia della storia. Saggi e inediti.

The Writings of Giovanni Gentile (to 1935)

Works about Giovanni Gentile in English

Works about Giovanni Gentile in Italian