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",Le terme « acte » doit être entendu ici non pas au sens aristotélicien, mais au sens fichtien, c'est-à-dire comme une action, une activité ou un agir dynamique, celui qui est propre à « la pensée au moment même où elle pense ». Fichte a en effet soutenu que toute réalité renvoie à l'acte qui la pose, c'est-à-dire à l'activité de la conscience, qui n'est pas seulement théorique mais aussi pratique. Déjà dans la sphère littéraire romantique, du reste, Goethe a proclamé dans Faust : « Au commencement était l'action » (Faust, première partie, v. 1224-1237). 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."Attualismo", Enciclopedia Treccani.
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.Diego Fusaro (a cura di), Giovanni Gentile.
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.
Gentile's actualism therefore aims to reform the Hegelian dialectic, to make it an authentically absolute idealism, with the addition of the theory of the pure act and the explication of the relationship between "logic of thinking" and "logic of thought."Sur l'importance de la réforme de la dialectique idéaliste d'origine hégélienne chez Gentile, voir cet entretien avec Gennaro Sasso . L'entretien est inclus dans l'Enciclopedia Multimediale delle Scienza Filosofiche.
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.Nicola Abbagnano, Ricordi di un filosofo, pp. 33-34, Milano, Rizzoli, 1990.
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. The "logic of thinking thought," understood as an archetypal-ontological instance, is a philosophical and dialectical logic; the "logic of thought thought," on the other hand, is formal and erroneous, because the individual thoughts coming from original thinking are merely a contemplative reflection, a kind of "by-product.".
Abstract thought and concrete thought Reality is thus not a fact, a factual and static datum, but an act, an action of the spirit, a dynamic activity endowed with an infinite power. Potentiality and actuality are to be understood here not so much in the Aristotelian sense as in the Neoplatonist sense borrowed from German idealism.
Although realists admit that the external world is the only knowable one, enclosable within a "static" concept based on the repeatability of experience that would testify to the existence of a solid basis transcending the mutability of our perceptions, they continue to dogmatically assume that there is something real independently of the thought that thinks it.
But a reality thought of as a "presupposition of thought," that is, thought of as "unthought" (being external, prior to thought), is a contradictory, dogmatic, and arbitrary concept that corresponds to the empirical point of view. Empiricism is an abstract point of view, because it separates the object from the ego, from the subject that posits it, and thus "abstracts" a part from the whole. The only concrete reality is the unitary synthesis of subject-object, which Gentile calls self-consciousness, in which it is possible to recompose the opposition between "thinking thought" and "thought thought", between "act" and "fact", or according to Gentile's terminology, between "concrete logos" and "abstract logos".
Immediacy and mediation The actual self-consciousness of thought is not immediate subjectivity, but mediated. Assuming the non-ego as opposite to the ego is in fact, at the beginning, an abstract and therefore immediate positing of thought that does not see itself in the objects of the world, a positing without mediation. Conversely, the transcendental (self-conscious) Ego is a mediated consciousness of itself, because it cannot subsist without consciousness of the other than itself, that is, of the world.Ugo e Annamaria Perone, , Claudio Ciancio, Storia del pensiero filosofico, III vol., pp. 340-347, Torino, SEI, 1988.
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.It is worth recalling the authoritative definition of Geymonat (op. cit., p. 315):
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.
The autoctisis of the mind Actual thought is in fact "the center in which the principle of life is, from which every reality sprouts":Giovanni Gentile, Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, volume II, p. 338, G. Laterza e Figli, 1923. 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,"Autoctisi", Enciclopedia Treccani. 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,Expression of the Latin Scholastic that means "cause of itself". 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.Gentile indeed points out that it is impossible to think something "without being conscious of the thought from which I think" (Sistema di Logica, Part I, chap. 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,The feeling, in fact, does not aspire to an already existing good, but considers the will itself as good in its self-fulfillment, as in the Christian invocation fiat voluntas tua (cf. 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.Fichte has already affirmed, moreover, that "all that is, is insofar as it is situated in the self, and outside the self there is nothing" (Fichte, Doctrine of Science).
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.