Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Italy. He was inspired by Risorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored 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 (Epistemology), a 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.[8] In religion he presented himself as a Catholic (of sorts), and emphasised actual idealism's Christian heritage; Antonio G. Pesce insists that 'there is in fact no doubt that Gentile was a Catholic', but he occasionally identified himself as an atheist, albeit one who was still culturally a Catholic.[9][10]

He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.

In 1898 he graduated in Letters and Philosophy with a dissertation titled Rosmini e Gioberti, that he realized under the supervision of Donato Jaja, a disciple of Bertrando Spaventa.[11]

During his academic career, Gentile served in a number of positions, including as:

• Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo (27 March 1910);
• Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa (9 August 1914);
• Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome (11 November 1917), and later as Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (1926);
• Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1928–32), and later as its Director (1932–43); and
• Vice President of Bocconi University in Milan (1934–44).

In 1922, Gentile was named Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. In this capacity he instituted the "Riforma Gentile" – a reformation of the secondary school system that had a long-lasting impact on Italian education.[12][13] His philosophical works included The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916) and Logic as Theory of Knowledge (1917), with which he defined 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, this theory indicated how philosophy could directly influence, mould, and penetrate life; or, how philosophy could govern life.

In 1925, Gentile headed two constitutional reform commissions that helped establish the corporate state of Fascism. He would go on to serve as president of the Fascist state's Grand Council of Public Education (1926–28), and even gained membership on the powerful Fascist Grand Council (1925–29).

Gentile's philosophical system – the foundation of all Fascist philosophy – 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 first part of the essay The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), attributed to Mussolini.[14] It was first published in 1932, in the Italian Encyclopedia, wherein he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism, Philosopher Kings, the abolition of the parliamentary system, and autarky. He also wrote the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals which was signed by a number of writers and intellectuals, including Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.

Gentile became a member of the Fascist Grand Council in 1925, and remained loyal to Mussolini even after the fall of the Fascist government in 1943. He supported Mussolini's establishment of the "Republic of Salò", a puppet state of Nazi Germany, despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws, and accepted an appointment in its government. Gentile was the last president of the Royal Academy of Italy (1943–1944).[15]

In 1944 a group of communist Patriotic Action Groups (GAP) partisans led by Bruno Fanciullacci assassinated Gentile as he returned from the prefecture in Florence.[16] His assassination divided the anti-fascist front. It was disapproved of by the Tuscan branch of the CLN with the sole exception of the Italian Communist Party, which approved the assassination and claimed responsibility for it.[17]

Gentile was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.[18]

A number of developments in Gentile's thought and career helped to define his philosophy, including:

• the definition of Actual Idealism in his work Theory of the Pure Act (1903);
• his support for the invasion of Libya (1911) and the entry of Italy into World War I (1915);
• his dispute with Benedetto Croce over the historic inevitability of Fascism;[23]
• his role as minister of education (1922–24);
• his belief that Fascism could be made subservient to his philosophical thought, along with his gathering of influence through the work of students like Armando Carlini (leader of the so-called "right Gentilians") and Ugo Spirito (who applied Gentile's philosophy to social problems and helped codify Fascist political theory); and
• his work on the Enciclopedia Italiana (1925–43; first edition finished in 1936).

Gentile considered Fascism the fulfillment of the Risorgimento ideals,[24] particularly those represented by Giuseppe Mazzini[25] and the Historical Right party.[26]

Gentile sought to make his philosophy the basis for Fascism.[27] However, with Gentile and with Fascism, the "problem of the party" existed by virtue of the fact that the Fascist "party", as such, arose organically rather than from a tract or pre-established socio-political doctrine. 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 growth 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 as well.

Gentile placed himself within the Hegelian tradition, but also sought to distance himself from those views he considered erroneous. He criticized Hegel's dialectic (of Idea-Nature-Spirit), and instead proposed that everything is Spirit, with the dialectic residing in the pure act of thinking. Gentile believed Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making. To the neo-Hegelian Gentile, Marx had made the dialectic into an external object, and therefore had abstracted it by making it part of a material process of historical development. The dialectic to Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking. It 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 and 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's externalizing of 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 individual's 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 (influenced by the Hegelian theory of the state) justified the corporative system, where in the individualized and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personably incorporated into the state ("Stato etico") 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 and private were a priori identified with each other in an active and 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 and 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 (as in Hegel) 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.

• Brown, Merle E. (1966). Neo-idealistic Aesthetics: Croce-Gentile-Collingwood, Wayne State University Press.
• Brown, Merle E., "Respice Finem: The Literary Criticism of Giovanni Gentile," in Italica, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring, 1970).
• Crespi, Angelo (1926). Contemporary Thought of Italy, Williams and Norgate, Limited.
• De Ruggiero, Guido, "G. Gentile: Absolute Idealism." in Modern Philosophy, Part IV, Chap. III, (George Allen & Unwin, 1921).
• Evans, Valmai Burwood, "The Ethics of Giovanni Gentile," in International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jan. 1929).
• Evans, Valmai Burwood, "Education in the Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile," in International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jan. 1933).
• Gregor, James A., "Giovanni Gentile and the Philosophy of the Young Karl Marx," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 24, No. 2 (April–June 1963).
• Gregor, James A. (2004). Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works by Giovanni Gentile. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers
• Gregor, James A. (2009). Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought, Princeton University Press.
• Gullace, Giovanni, "The Dante Studies of Giovanni Gentile," Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, No. 90 (1972).
• Harris, H. S. (1966). The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, U. of Illinois Press.
• Holmes, Roger W. (1937). The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile The Macmillan Company.
• Horowitz, Irving Louis, "On the Social Theories of Giovanni Gentile," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Dec. 1962).
• Lion, Aline (1932). The Idealistic Conception of Religion; Vico, Hegel, Gentile, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
• Lyttleton, Adrian, ed. (1973). Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile, Harper & Row.
• Minio-Paluello, L. (1946). Education in Fascist Italy, Oxford University Press.
• Moss, M. E. (2004). Mussolini's Fascist Philosopher: Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered, Lang.
• Roberts, David D. (2007). Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, University of Toronto Press.
• Romanell, Patrick (1937). The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, Columbia University.
• Romanell, Patrick (1946). Croce versus Gentile, S. F. Vanni.
• Runes, Dagobert D., ed. (1955). Treasury of Philosophy, Philosophical Library, New York.
• Santillana, George de, "The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile," in Isis, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Nov. 1938).
• Smith, J.A. "The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 20, (1919–1920).
• Smith, William A. (1970). Giovanni Gentile on the Existence of God, Beatrice-Naewolaerts.
• Spirito, Ugo, "The Religious Feeling of Giovanni Gentile," in East and West, Vol. 5, No. 2 (July 1954).
• Thompson, Merritt Moore (1934). The Educational Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, University of Southern California.
• Turi, Gabrielle, "Giovanni Gentile: Oblivion, Remembrance, and Criticism," in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 1998).

• 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. TELOS 133 (Winter 2005): pp. 75–94.
• Antonio Cammarana, Proposizioni sulla filosofia di Giovanni Gentile, prefazione del Sen. Armando Plebe, Roma, Gruppo parliamentare MSI-DN, Senato della Repubblica, 1975, 157 Pagine, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze BN 758951.
• Antonio Cammarana, Teorica della reazione dialettica : filosofia del postcomunismo, Roma, Gruppo parliamentare MSI-DN, Senato della Repubblica, 1976, 109 Pagine, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze BN 775492.