SOURCE: “The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile,” in ISIS, Vol. XXIX, No. 79, November, 1938, pp. 366-76.

[In the following essay, de Santillana contrasts the thinking of “scientific philosophers” with Gentile's actualist idealism.]

Whatever we do know about the ways of knowing, and whatever clarification the scientific philosophers may have reached in their endeavors, one thing seems fairly certain, i. e. that common sense goes on being at a discount. Theoretical physics in the past thirty years has done much to discourage the simple-minded type of scientist who approached theory in the state of mind of the gadgeteer. A recent attempt at rigorous thinking—we refer to Professor Dingle's latest book—ends in a kind of reluctant idealism; all the more significant in that it proceeds from a physicist who has never been reconciled at heart even to relativity. All in all, and notwithstanding the brilliant punitive forays of a certain school of scientists into the field of philosophy proper, there is a general atmosphere of uncertain expectancy and dark miscomprehension.

It may therefore be highly interesting to compare the status of the scientific philosophers with that of a school of thought most thoroughly alien to science—Italian “actualist idealism” in the person of its eloquent and prolific expounder, Professor Giovanni Gentile, of whom Wildon Carr could write recently: “it is doubtful whether there is a more influential teacher in the world today.” The very able exposé that Mr. Holmes has achieved should be praised on many a ground. Not only has he succeeded in conveying a doctrine “almost impossible to express in black and white”, and one which of all current philosophies is the most alien to the tenets of common sense: but he has managed at the same time to express shrewd and penetrating criticism. He has coaxed and forced Gentile into the open, into the company of living men and ideas, and drawn him out of the somewhat turgid and stuffy isolation which is so characteristic of oratorical wisdom.

This kind of thought is important, less because of the solutions it affords, than because of its comprehensiveness and well-rounded formal perfection. Its enemies will say that it hunts the philosophic hare into the ground. Its friends, that it provides a landscape and a setting for any other thought; once understood (not an easy process, we grant) it allows one to locate many of the more lasting issues.

Let us start from the common sense view of the philosopher's business. Here is Man, with his five senses and his will, eager to comprehend somehow this world around him and in him, disquieted in turn by the starry sky and by the moral law. Science thought it could crystallize this attitude by explaining the starry sky and taking the moral law as an emotional datum. It would have been all very well, if the outer world had stayed explainable, but this expanse of good solid matter has been turning, meanwhile, into operational concepts of doubtful materiality. Nothing daunted, the “physicalists” of the Vienna School have sought to consolidate at this level, by accepting the pragmatic view of knowledge and working it out as a refined instrument to push metaphysics out of the game. A proposition which makes sense, they say, is either logical or empirical. If it is purely formal and logical, like mathematics, it resolves into a tautology; if empirical, it is referable to the given outside, and there to be tested for truth or falsity. There is nothing here with which Gentile would not concur. If we should ask, however, what false or true mean, the physicalist would fall back on operational criteria: True is “what works”, and that is all there is to it. Any step beyond that will be condemned as meaningless. Knowledge means expert working acquaintance with a certain level or department of reality.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy to rule out the old desire to know, and reduce it to engineering or to accountancy. Philosophy rears again its uncouth head, and will not let itself be shooed off like that. Only it is clear that there are certain pastures to which it cannot go back. The old idea of the mind “mirroring” reality has been gone for centuries. And if we cast about for something else that the mind can do about reality, we find ourselves in a nasty dilemma. Either reality is just “the given”, something alien to be taken on trust from pointer readings, and then the very question of knowledge loses point somewhat. Such an alien world can be described, even as the physicalists are telling us, in some coherent language, it cannot be in any way comprehended, and “knowing” is just a sound for a vague and contradictory yearning, no more meaningful than the inchoate dreams of adolescence. Or—we resolutely admit that a Truth exists, that our act of affirming it has a meaning—and then we cannot look for it in the Given. The very fact of its being given makes it previous and alien to our thinking. We can accept it, we cannot endorse it. It is neither universal nor necessary according to our mind. Can we call that a truth? A truth transcending the subject is neither a truth nor a knowable reality. Gorgias discovered this quite a few years ago. It is taken on faith and has nothing to do with knowledge. And even if it is such as to be directly immanent in us, and directly intuited, it cannot be affirmed except as a blind wager. It does not partake of what we should mean as truth. Whatever hunch we may have about an inner truth, it is only an act of knowing that brings it out and makes it such. And this act of knowing obviously has little to do with the external world.

All this time we may be said to be still following the physicalist's directions. We are trying to give a meaningful content to the word “knowing” and find that it cannot be figured as a bridge between two realities, outer and inner, but rather as a pure act, springing out of the spirit and returning to it—an act, indeed, which is the whole of the spirit.

The analogy to Fichte's thought will be seen easily. Time has passed, and issues have become clearer. Gentile does not even presuppose a rational world, as Hegelians do. His world contains nothing that does not derive from the pure act of thinking. In this way, an extreme rationalism of the idealistic kind is bound to be the outcome. When we set about to construct a logic, it will have to be a priori. But how, people ask, does this logic create itself? Let Dr. Holmes answer: “It is customary for the logician, aware that his subject matter exhibits circularity, to be disturbed by the fact that the development itself of a formal structure for the expression of thought requires a formal structure already presupposed. But for Gentile, the fundamental aspects of logic are not concerned with contradictions.” (We shall see shortly how, speaking of the logic of the concrete) “Logic is the act of thinking. If there is nothing external to thinking, the thinking itself which is in search of a logic (and a real) provides in that search its logical principles.”

Again, one might ask how Gentile is going to lift himself up by his own braces. To be sure, he has to rely on the doctrine of internal relations: but it is no presupposition, it is rather a renewed statement of the absence of presuppositions. Knowledge comes from within thinking itself: such a position is bound to take unto itself the doctrine of internal relations, for if all entities are contained within the act of thinking they will consist of their relation to one another within thought.

Idealism is that peculiar creed which takes relations seriously, rather than beings. It founds them on the unity of the spirit, and this unity cannot be founded on anything else. It may be sad, but none of us can avoid the toils of some idealism, except maybe the theologian. A scientific philosopher like Meyerson will interpret the whole of scientific knowledge, and the very mathematisation of the real, as a devious but obstinate assertion of that identity. If we take the full consequences, we realize we must pit our thought against the whole of reality, assert our will to comprehend it utterly; in the same sense, we mean, as the watchmaker comprehends the watch; not as the chemist or the draughtsman would, as an analysis of parts or as a static show. We must know that we want to understand and not to describe.

Now the scientist cannot do it, and says so. It was once the proper job of the metaphysician. He would solve the world in terms of a “higher” and simpler “reality”. But this reality, in turn, was a guess of his, and its simplicity arbitrary. He could comprehend the world only by having recourse to God as a mediator and a guarantor of that reality. If we want to do away with mythology, we must make the Self perform all the services once discharged by the All-Comprehending—in short, attribute to it all the properties of Godhead; granting our human condition only an infinite allowance of time to get where God might have been from the beginning. These are the rules of the game. Else there is no philosophy.

Why should there be anyhow, says a physicalist like Wittgenstein, and many of us will whole-heartedly approve: “The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i. e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy, i. e. the propositions of natural science …”

But if there is no philosophy, then we are left with poetry as the only source of values. Again, the physicalist may consent, and many along with him. But men are not all physicists and poets, there will be some who want a lantern to go by: who want to know whether the word “true” cannot be applied at all in that zone whence spring aesthetic and moral values. Understanding may become a necessity of life. Wittgenstein, personally, supplies it to himself through an experience which is “not to be talked of”. Philosophy claims that it must be able to talk, to know good from bad and show how.

No method of classical logic can do it. The metaphysicians had struck there a wildcat hole. But it could not be otherwise, since logic deals only with abstractions, with material already dissected and prepared by the mind. The question is therefore whether the compelling force which is inherent to logic—the force of the spirit manifested in the act of judgement—cannot be applied to something else. It is here that Gentile, like many another, parts company with the scientists, and strikes the trail blazed by Hegel. For better, for worse, the modern world is committed to finding out what there is at the end of that trail.

The logic of the abstract is not all of logic, says Gentile, there is also a logic of the concrete. Since this is the hub of his system, and has been dismissed as unintelligible by otherwise intelligent critics, we think it deserves some elucidation.

What characterizes the logic of the abstract is its circularity, due to dealing with concepts as with objects. When the circle comes to a correct close, we are left with a tautology. And even if the circle extended to embrace what is called a spiritual reality, it would still admit it, whatever it be, as something presupposed: in other words, it would create another copy of nature, and this has occurred many a time. Thought is still a prisoner of its own idols.

But let us concentrate on that moment of thought which comes before any presupposition. There must be such a one. “Thinking presupposes nothing; but thought definitely presupposes thinking.” And now comes a novel and radical distinction between the two. Thought in the act, pensiero pensante, undergoes a sea-change right in the nascent state, for it becomes “the thought that was”, pensiero pensato, a mere object for successive thinking. We cannot think without grinding out this material which is alive no more. But it still is of the stuff of thought; it can be made to live again in the further act which synthesizes it with a new moment of experience, and in that fugitive, “concrete” instant it is again a living truth as it was at its birth: a new truth, for truth is ever new. It receives its values as truth, however, only from the act of being thought; it can condition that act but it cannot determine it, for the generative act ever transcends the engendered material. Hence, we may conclude that if truth in the ordinary sense can be frozen down into a formula tested by experiment, philosophical truth is ever on the wing, and resides only in the unlimited freedom of the act of thinking itself. An essential paradox, always implicitly acknowledged, and even by science in her own way. For science does imply a philosophy: it is an activity in which spirit and fact are locked in well-regulated contest. With Gentile, it is as if the spirit walked out and tried to establish its own program in the ideal dimensions. The game is out, and facts appear from then on as intruders of opaque irrelevance.

If we take Gentile's attitude we are left with the act of thinking as the whole of truth. On reflection, we shall find this quite natural. It should and does combine freedom with necessity, and that is the whole of the philosopher's dream as well as the artist's. That act is the logos, an ancient word resurrected: indeed, a whole ancient theme is being resurrected, and those who remember the Theaetetus will not wonder at this novel affirmation of true knowledge as transcending true opinion. This is still the old house that Plato built, and Gentile is now asking Protagoras to come in.

The logos has been used in the past by metaphysicians of the Platonic school as transcending the act of thought, and providing a norm for it. But a relation of transcendence is a poetical one, accessible only to the contemplative mind. In the hard business of philosophy, it cannot mean but that the one is alien to the other: and divided they have fallen, at the hands of Hume. There is no reason except intuitive to confer a value of truth upon an alien logos, and we are back at the point where we started. Certainty cannot be based on hunches. Whoever gets to realize this has to choose between idealism and scepticism. Truth implies a complete and spontaneous acceptance, an immanent free act of certainty. That is what we call knowing. And it is only in this freedom that morality is joined to logic. The true, the beautiful and the good are one at their inception, here is their link and their common power, and Man is the measure of them all.

The “pure act” of the spirit has no measure except in itself, so all valid measures can and do spring from it. It is norma sui, but its norm in its absolute purity is the universal itself … We have seen how logic can come of it, by the doctrine of internal relation. We perceive in thought a reality producing itself, reality as an activity. Indeed is there any other? Here, of a truth, it might be asked whether the question has a meaning. The factual immediate “reality” of nature becomes certain only through the mediate process of knowing, which establishes the relation of identity. By so doing it expresses the whole, center and circumference, of relational logic. But this is only the starting point of the Logic of the Concrete, which may well be termed the new metaphysics. The abstract logos is fundamentally a principle of identity: its law expresses the identity of differentiated thought. While the concrete logos expresses the difference in identical thought. The act of thinking is a continual differentiation from the thought that has just been thought, it does not break the link with it or it would be arbitrary, its very necessity lies in transcending it, in synthesizing it with something new and different. We perceive here the very law of life. From the awareness Ego = Ego we must pass, under penalty of freezing up, to a Not-Ego. What would be a contradiction in the logic of the abstract becomes a correlation, and a foundational one, in the logic of the concrete. A person lives only insofar as he changes while still remaining himself. Becoming has a logic of its own, it is a logic of integration. This is only another expression of that dialectical continuity, of that law of change which science has sought to grasp in its own way, by means of the calculus. Philosophy expresses it, since the romantic era, by a dualization of identity, by the discovery of thought alienating itself from its original term in order to think. Outside of this dialectical rhythm of its own, thought cannot be said to have any contact with nature. It can describe it as an object: but then Nature will be correlatively static, and were it even the Heraclitean Fire itself; it becomes alive and real only insofar as we do something about it. Thought cannot mirror nature, it has only itself as a mirror, and only its past thoughts as a fuel for its unceasing flame. It can comprehend nature only by comprehending itself in everything. It is the subject dealing with the object and synthesizing it with itself: we see again how this logic of the concrete is nothing but action, it is one with the act of the spirit.

Let us draw one consequence only by way of conclusion. The object of abstract is multiplicity, which we try to unify. That is what the scientist is after. His name is legion, and his response is as unreflective as that of any good member of a team. Whereas concrete thought is the thought of a single consciousness and can have no multiplicity about it. Unity is the watchword, throughout the system. This symbolizes the integrated personality. Each act of thinking is the act of the entire concrete Ego. We will not touch here upon the grievous question of solipsism, which would require a treatment all by itself. We think that can be faced. Besides, the poet and the existential philosopher are far more severe solipsists, and nobody appears to mind. But there is another and more serious consideration. This all-embracing attitude which “comprehends all the others without being comprehended by them” and claims to deserve alone the name of philosophy, takes place explicitly in interiori homine. Not, of course, in the empirical person which is brushed aside (another inevitable paradox) but in the spirit of the ideally isolated Thinker. The Concrete Logos inhabits a perplexing world of inconcrete people. Herein, we venture to state, lies its fundamental renunciation both of science and of society.

Gentile would strongly protest against such an inference, but it cannot be denied that somehow both science and social existence seem to be utterly sterilized in his scheme, even although official recognition is granted to their necessities. They simply will not stay put within the frame. We have seen why. You cannot pretend to recognize a game and at the same time ignore the existence of the opponent: the teams dissolve of themselves. Science is intersubjective, its place is inter homines, here is the source of its irrepressible philosophical independence and value. The developments of the whole situation are fairly obvious.

Gentile, it goes without saying, is far more consistent than the scientist. It is his business as a philosopher to be. For everything he finds the proper place: for Man, for the State, for God, for Nature. It is a feast of the understanding; the seats are set, each one nicely labelled, but no one seems to arrive. At long last, in stalks the Statue of the Commander. He comes for the State, which never passes up an invitation.

There is a Nemesis for coherent philosophies, as for all thoroughgoing things, and Gentile has been inviting it all along. What we get out of him, as never before, is the fundamental alternative between the hopeless straining of the scientist after the secret of nature as revealed in the cosmos, and the resolute faith of man that there must be a certainty to provide the norm for his action. If we look for truth, we cannot find it in the cosmos. The known transcends the knower, and if our judgment must be synthetic, as Gentile has proved it must, we even have to renounce the hope for any true judgements about the world. We may perceive it poetically, we may solve it existentially, or we may develop working hypotheses for whatever action we like—but we may not know it. Again, this has been stated many a time, but never so consequently. The science of nature here appears condemned to irremediable inferiority. This cosmological surrender is meant to pay for what Gentile considers his great asset, a vision of truth springing from moral freedom. We stand to choose between truth, if it is to be universal and necessary, and assured knowledge of anything transcending the act of thinking. These two stand as what a physicist might call conjugate concepts.

What can the philosopher hope for? Is a clear statement of the sacrifice and of its measures enough to disarm Nemesis? It seems to come to this: Whether philosophy is entitled to such a knowledge and such a certainty as Gentile has been eloquently proclaiming all along. There is a dark and awesome pitfall here, that the mind is not yet able to plumb. Berkeley's riddle on the validity of reason has never been solved. It might very well be that to look for certainty in the act of the spirit, so defined, is to take ready counters for possible coins. It might well be that the search for a Concrete Logo-centric Ego should turn out a goblin hunt. Nemesis may still be waiting around the corner: she seems to be lurking already in the hopeless paradoxes in which Gentile the man has found himself enmeshed. We mean Gentile the man of action and political thinker, even more than Gentile the educator.

As Dr. Holmes points out, there is an interesting parallel to be drawn between the Plato of the early dialogues and Gentile. Both draw a philosophical circle that leaves out the cosmos. The great difference between the two is that Gentile's doctrine is such that we may be sure he will never write his Parmenides and eventually his Timaeus unless he completely renounces his actual idealism. For it is the essence of actual idealism that it admits of no intercourse with the universe around us as such. This should affect only the scientific value of the system, but, strangely enough, it reaches deeper than that. And here, too, we cannot help feeling that this philosophy provides an important test. For, notwithstanding its forcible demonstration of the moral nature of reality, it will never be able to construct its Republic either. It is not that Gentile avoids worldly problems. In fact, he insists on being right in the midst of them: he believes in them as providing the only reality for his actualism. But the developments of his doctrine in action have proved so embarrassingly lunar and irrelevant that it is best to draw a chaste veil of silence. It is at this point that the irony of Fate overtakes idealism at last. For the unique Act becomes demonstrably, in the light of common day, actual passivity. As with Hegel, but even more so. Rational, persuasive, albeit half-hearted yielding to the winds as they list. Dr. Holmes merely hints at the danger: “this kind of philosophy seems to open the way to every kind of impulsive and irrational judgement in the name of truth.” So, maybe, it should not do according to the most favorable interpretation, but so, actually, it does. There is a moral check implicit in the system, it comes out as personal responsibility, in its most absolute sense. But even that does not appear to provide a firm hold in the ever-growing flood of the ever-present Act. And there is no appeal from actuality for actualism. So that here it is that we are entitled to found valid reasons both for acquiescence and for distrust. Actual idealism is as perfect and comprehensive a philosophy as can be obtained. But in its very formal perfection it partakes of what Valéry would have called, “la pureté du non-être”.