Giovanni Gentile

Dzieła

• 1916Teoria ogólna ducha jako czystego aktu

  Główne ujęcie idealizmu aktualnego: nic nie istnieje poza teraźniejszym aktem myślenia, w którym podmiot i przedmiot, jednostka i ogół wytwarzane są razem.

• 1946Geneza i struktura społeczeństwa

  Napisana w 1943 roku i opublikowana po jego śmierci: społeczeństwo powstaje w jednostce jako wewnętrzny dialog, a państwo jest najwyższą formą tej wspólnoty etycznej.

Stanowisko

Gentile is on the map as the author of actual idealism, a radical form of Italian neo-idealism. Following Spaventa and reforming Hegel’s dialectic, he held that reality is not a given object but the present act of thinking, in which subject and object, individual and universal are produced together; nature and history exist only as moments of this act. From this he derived a philosophy of education as the self-formation of spirit, in which teacher and pupil become one in the act of teaching, and a theory of the ethical state, which the individual finds within as the will of the community. Croce objected publicly in 1913 that actual idealism dissolved the distinct forms of spirit into a single undifferentiated act, and the political break of 1925 ended their collaboration; Gramsci criticised both the philosophy and the school reform; in Britain R. G. Collingwood engaged with his ideas. Gentile’s thought cannot be separated from his role in fascism: as minister, as author of the 1925 manifesto and of the philosophical part of the “Doctrine of Fascism”, he gave the regime a philosophical justification, and his concept of the ethical state entered its self-description as a “totalitarian” state. Research, from Gabriele Turi’s biography (1995) to A. James Gregor (2001), documents this role; it remains debated how far his idealism itself implied this politics.

Życie i kontekst

Giovanni Gentile was born on 30 May 1875 in Castelvetrano in Sicily. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa under Donato Jaja, a pupil of Bertrando Spaventa, and wrote his thesis on Rosmini and Gioberti (printed 1898); “The Philosophy of Marx” followed in 1899. From 1903 he worked with Benedetto Croce on “La Critica”. He taught at secondary schools, then held chairs in Palermo, from 1914 in Pisa and from 1917 in Rome, and in 1920 founded the “Giornale critico della filosofia italiana”. Appointed a senator in 1922, he was minister of public education in Mussolini’s government from 31 October 1922 to 1 July 1924 and carried out the school reform of 1923; in the same year he joined the National Fascist Party. On 21 April 1925 he published the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals”, to which Croce replied with a counter-manifesto. As scientific director of the Enciclopedia Italiana he wrote the philosophical first part of the article “Fascismo” (1932), which was circulated under Mussolini’s name as “The Doctrine of Fascism”. After 1943 he sided with the Republic of Salò and became president of the Accademia d’Italia. On 15 April 1944 he was shot dead in Florence by a commando of the communist GAP.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Rosmini and Gioberti (Rosmini e Gioberti, 1898)
• The Philosophy of Marx (La filosofia di Marx, 1899)
• The Reform of Hegel’s Dialectic (La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 1913)
• The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, 1916)
• System of Logic as Theory of Knowing (Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, 1917–23)
• Genesis and Structure of Society (Genesi e struttura della società, written 1943, published 1946)

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• Podróż „Filozofia w czasach narodowego socjalizmu” · Przystanek 1 z 10