[In the following essay, Evans presents an overview of Gentile's philosophical system.]

Philosophy should yield a concrete notion of the meaning of reality. This is the aim of Gentile. His philosophy, he tells us, is actual idealism, for it considers the absolute idea to be an act; or equally well it may be described as an absolute spiritualism, for only if the idea is act is all reality spirit. He sets out from the identification of the Hegelian Becoming with the act of thought, for Becoming and not Being is Hegel's first concrete logical category.¹

Such a concrete idealism means, according to Gentile, that the thinking of the philosopher is reasonable but not narrowly intellectual. It must contain not merely “mind,” but “the good spiritual disposition, what we call heart, good will, charity, sympathy, open-mindedness, warmth of affection.” In “the full concept of the spiritual act consists the living nucleus of philosophy.”²

The omission of mind from the concept of reality is not even intellectually satisfying. To leave out thought is for us, who are a critical and appreciative side of the universe, to leave out the meaning of reality. We are necessary to reality, for what is the reality of something which is not known to be real and does not know itself to be real?

To conceive a reality is to conceive, at the same time, and as one with it, the mind in which that reality is represented; and therefore the concept of a material reality is absurd.³

A reality without thought and therefore without meaning takes us straight to scepticism, for nothing can be known about it.

The whole … cannot be constituted in abstraction from the thought in which it is posited. And when we do not abstract from thought, thought cannot appear as a mere co-efficient which only needs to be added externally in order to complete the sum of reality; because, having granted that thought is the complement of the real, the real becomes ideal as the function of thought, and therefore is resolved into thought itself.⁴

Gentile's identification of reality with the concept, his view that philosophy is reality and not, as usually supposed, merely thought about reality, marks an advance from the standpoint of Hegel. Philosophy does not, like the owl of Minerva in Hegel's famous simile, take flight only in the dusk; philosophy is not mere reflection upon the past; it is the pure act of thinking, and as such is present and makes present the object of its activity, an object of its activity, an object which is only an aspect of the process.⁵ The reality which is living act is aware of itself as living, and is therefore identical with the concept of reality.

An absolute idealism cannot conceive the idea except as thought in act, as all but consciousness of the idea itself, if we keep for idea the objective meaning which originally it had in Plato and which it continues to have in common thought and in the pre-suppositions of scientific knowing, that of being the term of thought or intuition.⁶

This identification of reality with thinking seems to fail to reach the goal of the concrete only if thinking is limited to theory—to theory which is mere theory and therefore opposed to practice. How is such a distinction to be drawn once we have ceased to set up an external world independent of and opposed to mind?

But if we set aside the fantastic relations supposed to exist between the will and external reality … what criterion of distinction is there between knowledge and will? Every time we contrapose the theoretical to the practical we find we have first of all to presuppose the reality intellectualistically, just as empiricism does and just as Greek philosophy continued to do throughout its course, so precluding every way of identifying mind with practical activity.⁷

If on the other hand we examine any act of thinking as it occurs, we find that it is both a theoretical discourse and a practical deed. Thinking is therefore more than “mere” theory, and, as self-conscious activity, we see that it is the most complete life, for it is real for itself.

So it is that we all fell our existence to consist in the existence which we make for ourselves: I say “our existence” in relation to that “we” which affirms itself and says: “We”; and is in short self-consciousness, the active and substantial principle of mind.⁸

Mind is to be described as “pure” act because it is free, that is, unconstrained by any obstacle which would introduce an aspect of passivity. Its past and its future are real only in it, i.e., so far as they are present. Such an active free reality, according to Gentile, can only be found in mind—not in mind as thought (pensiero pensato) but in thinking itself (pensiero pensante), thinking in the act, which is the life of the spirit.

Thought, in so far as act of thought, is, as it has been said, in not being, and in being is not. It is a unity of being and not-being which is understood when we think of becoming, whence the immediacy of being is denied, through the assertion of being, but as identical with its opposite … Becoming is the category of universal reality, but only if this reality in its universality is understood as thought.⁹

This seems a confused idea, Gentile says, except when it is realised that

such a concept can be thought only as thought of thought, as that self-consciousness which is obviously present even in the case of the adversary or the ironic commentator of the category of becoming; so that nothing is more evident than that being which is not, or than that not-being which is, in which this category consists.¹⁰

The philosophy which is becoming has to be “realised through a process which is not a vain distraction of activity but a continual creation of reality, a continual increase of its own being.”¹¹ It should therefore be possible to trace development in philosophy, and for this reason Gentile desires to show the necessity of what he calls the analytic or “Aristotelian” philosophy in order that the synthetic or “Hegelian” philosophy may have its full meaning. For if philosophy is a “continual creation of reality” then “every system has its truth, which cannot be the truth of its own time without being the truth of every time.”¹² There really is a nature which is independent of mind—from a certain point of view; there really is a past which we cannot change—if we think so. This independent reality is the product of thinking as it drops into the past and so loses its spiritual value. Nature or the material world exists as the limit to thinking set by itself, and removed by every realisation or re-thinking.

There is also in what is thought, taken in itself, a double nature, and its intrinsic contradiction is a form of the restless activity of thought. What is thought cannot be what is not thinkable because it is what is thought, and it is what is thought just because not thinkable. The thing thought is thing, nature, matter, everything which can be considered as a limit of thought, and what limits thought is not itself thinkable.¹³ But if we are now asked: Can we think that this reality which confronts the mind and which the mind has to analyse, a reality therefore which is a pre-supposition of the mind whose object it is, is spiritual reality? We must answer at once: No.¹⁴

Hence there is room for analytic logic, so long as it does not mistake itself for the concrete.¹⁵

This conservation of the values of events brings a new importance to history—temporal change is no mere illusion. As development, history is philosophy, not a mere copy of reality.

A choice of material is inevitable; and a choice requires a criterion. And the criterion in this case can only be a notion of the philosophy.¹⁶ … the history of philosophy which we must keep in view if we are to see it as identical with philosophy, is the history which is history of philosophy for us in the act of philosophizing.¹⁷

The identity of philosophy with its history is the typical form and culminating point of the resolution of temporal into eternal history, or indeed of the facts of mind into the concept or spiritual act. It is the culminating point, because philosophy is the highest and at the same time the concretest form of spiritual activity, the form which judges all the others and can itself be judged by none.¹⁸

Some mention must be made of Gentile's treatment of art and religion. His concept of reality is that of the “immanent universal.” Art is a “moment” of this concrete reality. It is as Croce says, intuition or expression. “… Art is the form of subjectivity, or, as we also say, of the mind's immediate individuality.”¹⁹ It is lyrical, un-self-conscious act. On the other hand, religion glorifies the object, and its characteristic tendency is towards worship. The object as cut off from the subject is essentially unknowable.

Religion may be defined as the antithesis of art. Art is the exaltation of the subject released from the chains of the real in which the subject is posited positively; and religion is the exaltation of the object, released from the chains of the mind, in which the identity, knowability, and rationality of the object consists. The object in its abstract opposition to knowing is the real. By that opposition, knowing is excluded from reality, and the object is therefore eo ipso unknowable, only affirmable mystically as the immediate adhesion of the subject to the object.²⁰

Both religion and art alike are abstractions from the point of view of philosophy; this is proved by the fact that if we treat them as concrete, they escape from us and turn into each other, as Hegel has shown that abstractions must do. Art, the pure subject, does not know itself, and therefore is like nature, a mere object; religion, the pure object, is so alien from the subject that it is unknown to it, and leaves us with mere subject.

The work of religion is to provide the object by means of which the subject may know itself, and this work is shared by science which so long as it remains purely scientific (not philosophic) assumes that its object exists independently of the subject. It inconsistently holds that this independent object can be known in its independence. Once the relativity of object to subject in knowing is recognised, the “independent” or real object becomes a thing in itself, and is left to metaphysical speculation or religious adoration. Philosophy solves the problem by showing that subject and object are aspects of the real subject which is not a substance but an act. But the analysis of this act into subject and object is a necessary prelude to synthetic philosophy.

Gentile takes the problem of error in dependence upon that of truth. There could be no understanding of the possibility of truth unless the object of mind were within mind. But this being so, any idealist philosophy according to which reality is already realised is at a loss to account for error. Mind could not fail to know a reality both ready for it to copy and within its own grasp. But according to Gentile reality is not already realised. It is not being, but becoming, and truth, like reality, is a process. Error occurs only when the abstract treatment of mind (which has its justification) is thought to be concrete—it is the assertion that we know what we do not know, the taking of “brute fact” for philosophy. Error is the moment of negativity which is essential to becoming. Because reality is changing, whatever can be said of it is true, but also ceasing to be true.

When once the concept of reality as self-concept is understood, we see clearly that our mind's real need is not that error and evil should disappear from the world but that they should be eternally present. Without error there is no truth, without evil there is no good, not because they are two terms bound to one another in the way that Plato, following Heracleitus, said pleasure and pain are bound together, but because error and evil are the non-being of that reality, mind, the being of which is truth and goodness.²¹

It should be clear that the concrete thinking which is philosophy is no mere finite thinking taken in abstraction from other finite thinking and from the objects of the thinkers.²² It accounts for such finite thinking and for its objects. Berkeley's error was to make concrete thinking transcend finite thought. But concrete thinking or self-realisation is possible and real only in the thinking which is finite, as the universal is real in the particulars.

Let it not be thought that the concept of this deeper personality, the Person which has no plurality, in any way excludes and effectually annuls the concept of the empirical ego. Idealism does not mean mysticism. The particular individual is not lost in the being of the “I” which is absolute and truly real. For this absolute “I” unifies but does not destroy. It is the one which unifies in itself every particular and empirical ego. The reality of the transcendental ego even implies the reality of the empirical ego. It is only when it is cut off from its immanent relation with the transcendental ego that the empirical ego is falsely conceived.²³

While however experience teaches us that “Reality is thought by me” the self which thinks the us is not the mere empirical ego. We think reality only when other selves in principle agree with our thinking. Even the conception of a transcendental self, whose thinking is reality, is superseded in Gentile's philosophy if that self is thought of as a “thing.” It is “not a being, but a constructive process.”²⁴ All that is real of self is in the act—we gain nothing by referring the act to a substance.

The thought which is true thought must generate the being of what it is the thought, and this precisely is the meaning of the Cartesian Cogito. I—this reality which is “I” … this “I am” is in so far as I think. I realise it in thinking, with a thought which is myself thinking. The “I” … only is in so far as it is self-consciousness. The “I” is not a consciousness which presupposes the self as its object, but a consciousness which posits a self.²⁵

This view of Gentile that reality is the concept or Mind as Pure Act is known in Italy at least as a new idealism. It is idealism because it takes a place in the line of those philosophies which have taught that the real is mind; it is new, because it is the latest development of this theory. Gentile himself traces the descent of his thought from that of Berkeley through that of Vico and Hegel to its ultimate form as pure Actual Idealism. The earlier thinkers, in spite of increasing stress on the immanence of mind in reality, retained the notion of transcendence under the impression that in some form it was necessary—as God the thinker and creator of all ideas, or as Providence guiding the acts of mankind, or as infinite mind, a goal beyond the reach of the finite. Gentile develops the logical consequences of immanence. Mind cannot transcend matter, for such a proposition is convertible, yielding a disguised materialism. Immanent mind is to be identified with reality, it is neither above it nor below. Hence it cannot be a contemplation of reality, a mere thinking about something other than thought. It is self-conscious activity, than which there is no other reality. Reality and value, theory and practice, are no longer severed in the new idealism which harmonises the most difficult opposites in the concrete concept of reality as pure act.

Notes

1. La Riforma della Dialettica Hegeliana, Pref., v.

2. Theory of Mind as Pure Act, Trans. by H. Wildon Carr. P. 8 and Pref., xxvi. Hereafter referred to as “Theory.”

3. Op. cit., 1.

4. Logica, I. Cap. I, p. 13. Cf. Theory, 3 and 4, and 238.

5. Logica I. Cap. I, p. 13.

6. Theory, 253. Cf. Logica I. Cap. I, p. 13.

7. Theory, 236.

8. Logica I. Cap. IV, p. 90.

9. Logica I. Cap. IV, p. 91.

10. Ibid., 93.

11. Theory, 48.

12. Logica I. Pref., v and vi.

13. Theory, 258.

14. Ibid., 22.

15. Cf. Theory, 1, 30, 31, and 49-53.

16. Ibid., 211.

17. Ibid., 213-14. Cf. 202.

18. Ibid., 215. Cf. note to Ch. XIII, Pp. 217-19.

19. Ibid., 223.

20. Theory, 226-27.

21. Theory, 246-7.

22. Cf. Theory, Ch. I.

23. Ibid., 14. Cf. 107.

24. Theory, Ch. II, sec. 7.

25. Ibid., 100-101. Cf. Logica I. Cap. I.