SOURCE: “Gentile's Philosophy of the Spirit,” in Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. IV, No. 13, January, 1929, pp. 3-22.

[In the following essay, de Burgh examines Gentile's theory of Actual Idealism.]

I

Gentile's philosophy merits the attention of every serious thinker, for it presents the doctrine that reality is spiritual in a more uncompromising form than is to be found elsewhere, and claims to solve on this principle all the great problems that have beset the history of metaphysic. His own name for it is Absolute or Actual Idealism (Idealismo assoluto or attuale). For Gentile, nothing is real but the Spirit, and by the Spirit he means the pure act of self-conscious thinking. “The subject that conceives itself in conceiving All is the reality itself.”¹ In the act of conscious thinking, the Spirit is present in its entirety as subject (Io universale, transcendentale, assoluto); generating therein by its own creative spontaneity a world of objects, and resolving the products of this act of objectification into the womb that gave them birth. In this immanent dialectic—pure subject (thesis), pure object (antithesis), subject-object (synthesis)—lies the rhythmic life-history of the Spirit. “Our doctrine,” writes Gentile, “is the theory of the Spirit as act which posits its object in a multiplicity of objects, resolving their multiplicity and objectivity in the unity of the subject itself.”² For such a doctrine, transcendence is the enemy, the Goliath whom Gentile has gone forth to slay. He confronts us, on almost every page of his writings, with an ineluctable dilemma. Either a philosophy of sheer immanence, or reality is unknowable. “An idealistic conception aims at conceiving the Absolute itself, the All, as idea, and is therefore intrinsically absolute idealism. But absolute it cannot be, unless the idea coincides with the very act of knowing it; since—and this is the deepest source of the difficulty that besets Platonism—if the idea were not the very act by which it is known, it would leave something outside itself and the idealism would thus far fail to be absolute.”³ To seek reality beyond the bounds of actual thinking—whether in the Platonic Forms, or in Kant's noumenon, or in the Nature of the scientist, or in the undiscovered Past of history, or in the God of religion—means a flight to empty mysticism, a blind worship of the Ding an sich The admission of the transcendent at any point is tantamount to a betrayal of the inalienable rights of human reason.

It is not the purpose of this article to expound Gentile's philosophy in detail, but rather to indicate certain difficulties that bar the way to its acceptance. Yet, before we pass to criticism, we must note three characteristics essential to the main position. (i) The universal Spirit, which is the whole and only real, has its life in the thinking of the individual human subject, and nowhere else. It is the Iouniversale the υοηsιs υοηsεωs, not of Aristotle's transcendent deity, but of the God made Man in man's living effort to achieve self-consciousness. It is no impersonal mind, behind and beyond our human thinking provoking to the problem, which Bradley pronounced insoluble, how the Absolute differentiates itself into a plurality of finite centres. What we call a finite centre reveals itself to its own thought as the one universal self-consciousness, which is apprehended as an empirical multiplicity of thinkers by virtue of its own act of self-diredemption. The Spirit objectifies itself as a plurality of object-selves; but the empirical Ego, thus generated, proves on reflection to be an absraction, clamant for resolution in the concrete unity of the universal Ego from which it sprang. The distinction of “I” and “thou” is real, in so far as such objectification is a necessary moment in the Spirit's dialectic; but there is no ultimate severance, for their unity is implied in every thought and word and deed. We have not to deduce the individual from the universal, or pass by induction to the universal from the individual, still less to deny the reality of the one in favour of the other; the universal is the individual, the individual is the universal, bare universality (Realism) and bare particularity (Nominalism) being alike abstractions from the concrete reality. Hence the world of objects (Nature) has no status of its own right. Spirit alone, the creator of all subjects and of all objects, is, as conceptus sui and causa sui, absolutely free; and the human thinker, in the living act of thinking, is free with the full freedom of the Spirit.

(ii) Reality, as the Spirit's act of self-creation (autoctisi), is a Becoming; and since Being implies fixity and the negation of process, nothing can truly be said to be. To assert of anything that it is involves objectification and abstraction, the substitution for the act of thinking (pensiero pensante) of its inert and lifeless products (pensiero pensato) in the form of “facts” or “things.” Such reality as is proper to these “facts” accrues to them only as moments in the rhythmic process of the subject that projects them by its own creative energy. “For idealism, if we assign to words their most vigorous meaning, there is neither a spirit, nor the Spirit; for being (essere) and spirit are contradictory terms, and a spirit (a spiritual reality, e.g. a poet or a work of poetry) by the very fact of being would cease to be spirit.”⁴ That which is falls outside the living process of thought as its static presupposition. Hence a metaphysic of Being, such as was Platonism par excellence, is ex hypothesi a metaphysic of transcendence. Spirit is subject, and not substance; Hegel's famous dictum in the Phenomenology being reaffirmed by Gentile with an enrichment of meaning of which Hegel hardly dreamed. His interpretation of the “pure act” of Spirit is drastic to the verge of paradox. There are living philosophers, notably M. Bergson and Professor Alexander, who tell us that spatio-temporal motion is thinkable per se, apart from a moving body as its bearer. Gentile asserts the like of Spirit. In lieu of the “passage of Nature,” he teaches the “passage of Mind.” Nought is but it becomes; “verum et fieri convertuntur, verum est factum quatenus fit.”⁵

(iii) It follows that, for Gentile, time is real; not, be it understood, the time of the objective order of chronological succession, but the time which functions as the diversity intrinsic to the Spirit's eternal act of unification. The life of the Spirit is through and through historical. Time and eternity are not opposites, nor is the one, as it was for Plato, the “moving image” of the other; they are more even than inseparable correlates: they are identical, and distinguishable merely as two facets of a single reality, like the convex and the concave of the curve. Without time there can be no eternity, without eternity no time. In this proffered solution of a secular problem in metaphysic, Gentile's thought touches its extreme of apparent paradox. The Spirit posits time and the temporal in an eternal present; nor is there other eternal beyond this act of self-creation. The sequence of historical events, viewed in their abstract multiplicity as data for the historian, yield a scene of chaos and unreason; viewed as his self-objectified thought, as the self-expression of the Spirit which is the principle of unity in difference, they reveal an “eternal theogony, fulfilled in the inmost heart of our being.”⁶

On these principles, carried out into their applications with relentless logic, Gentile claims to have reconciled the historic antitheses of metaphysics. The one and the many, the universal and the particular, Subjectivism and Realism, necessity and freedom, theôria and praxis, value and fact, thought and things—all are resolved, as by the wand of a magician, into the unity of the Spirit which is the bond of peace. The effect on the reader is in truth somewhat bewildering. The method, in its simplicity and audacity, conveys the impression of an act of speculative hubris. But Gentile's system is not the easy outcome of dogmatic prejudice, but the garnered fruit of long and patient intellectual labour. His trenchant criticism of other philosophies, past and present, betrays in every line how he has himself wrestled with the difficulties which they strove, and strove in vain, to solve. Yet, when we are face to face with his final synthesis and endeavour to grasp its relation to the substructure of reasoned argument, we have an uneasy sense of a chasm which the preparatory inquiries hardly avail to bridge. Can it be true, we ask, that this doctrine of pure immanence, with its ruthless denial of any presupposition limiting the activity of the thinking subject, and its identification of the Absolute with the individual thought of the individual human thinker, is the only alternative to Naturalism, the only safeguard for reason from falling into the clutches of Giant Despair? Can it be true, that if God (the object-God, Deus sive Natura) is, then I am not (not, i.e., the free self I know myself to be, but a slave bound to the car of Juggernaut); while, if I am, then God (the universal Spirit) is none other than I? It is well, doubtless, to pause and reflect that Naturalism is a sorry refuge, and that faith in the transcendent is beset by many pitfalls, luring even the philosophic believer to reshape the world he strives to know in accordance with his own heart's desire. Gentile's teaching, at least, yields no honey to be carried off to the ecclesiastical hive. But are the members of the disjunction exhaustive? Is there no third possibility? Above all, is his own answer wholly untainted by the transcendence that it purports to exclude? It may be that, despite Gentile's disclaimer, the ghost of a mystical intuition still haunts the inmost sanctuary of his metaphysic

II

Let us look a little more closely into the basis of this philosophy.

Gentile thinks. If he thinks, he must, as Plato long ago remarked, think something; let the something be—for he has been Minister of Public Instruction in Signor Mussolini's Government—a reform in the curriculum of Italian secondary schools. To the eye of the plain man, we have here a transitory incident in the official life of an Italian of a certain age, now seated at his desk in Rome, a single individual among a world of other persons and things, engaged on one among a host of possible mental avocations. An hour ago he was thinking of something else; an hour hence he will be thinking of something different again. But let the plain man ask Gentile for the true interpretation of his act of thought. He will hear with amazement that what seemed so trivial an incident in the day's routine was in reality the operation of the Absolute Spirit, immanent in Gentile's present act; that its object was, not the mere syllabus embodied on the typed sheet before him, but the whole universe, il tutto, immanent in the visible memorandum; that this universal object was nothing else than the same Absolute Subject self-objectified as the world of things; that in the individual thought, thus viewed in its truth, the transitory “now,” the localized “here,” with their entire spatio-temporal context, are gathered up into the unity of the Spirit's eternal present, and, as such, achieve immortality.

There is paradox here, assuredly, for the plain man; is there paradox also for the philosopher? It behoves us to be wary in our answer, for the far journeys of the philosopher have often led him to a haven which, for all its remoteness, has proved wide enough to afford a shelter also to the beliefs of the plain man.

For instance, it may well be true—and the plain man can be brought to see it—that every object of thought is so linked with every other object, that none is what it is in utter isolation, that in each there is in some sense involved the structure of the whole world. How else could we posit as the prius of all our scientific thinking that, not Nature only, but the universe, is a single system?

It may well be true, again, that the individual thinker is no bare unitary self, a monad without windows, possessor of a private world and of nought besides, but that there is that in all his thinking which in some sense transcends particularity, and bears witness to the immanent presence of universal mind. How else could he, in a simple act, say, of arithmetical thinking, compass a common and objective truth?

Once more, it may well be true that, save for an intimate affinity between subject and object, knower and known, the thinker could not grasp the object in the act of thought. An object unrelated to a subject would be unknowable, a thing-in-itself that was no object at all. Or, as Bosanquet has put it, there is a sense in which, in all thinking, mind makes itself one with the whole life of reality and affirms that all existence enters into and sustains its decree.⁷

There are many, doubtless, who would cavil at these admissions, at least in this summary mode of formulation. But they have been granted by philosophers of high distinction, and contain, on the face of them, nothing contrary to reason However, they are far from carrying us the whole way to Gentile's metaphysical conclusions. Leaving them therefore as they stand, we pass to consider the further and more daring principles which demand acceptance, if we are to follow Gentile to his goal.

The subject-object relation implies identity of the related terms. Conoscere è identificare⁸; in all knowing, knower and known are one. The object is not merely an object for a subject, but has its whole being in the being of the subject. Thought posits nothing “save what is radically identical with the thought itself.”⁹ In these words Gentile formulates what he regards as one of the main pillars of his system. The object is the product of the subject's creative art; as such, its reality consists in our knowing of it, and in nothing else. A reality other than the act of thinking it cannot be thought, and what cannot be thought cannot be. “To be posited for the subject (pel suggetto) without being posited by the subject (dal suggetto) is a contradiction in terms.”¹⁰ The thesis of a pure (abstract) subject apart from the object, and the antithesis of a pure (abstract) object apart from the subject, are alike resolved in the concrete synthesis, wherein the subject posits itself as object, and which alone is real.¹¹

We must be careful not to misinterpret this principle, pregnant as it manifestly is with far-reaching consequences. It does not mean that the object is absorbed or annulled in the synthesis, in a night wherein all cows are black. The unity of the Spirit is not fact, but act; an act of self-recognition that creates and unifies its own diversity. In this process of unified diversification, of diversified unification, the many (the object) and the one (the subject) alike find their truth. Nor, again, must the subject in the synthesis be construed as the empirical Ego, to whose states of mind the Subjective Idealist reduces the objective world. That was Berkeley's error, which if we rule out Berkeley's unwarranted appeal to a transcendent God, is bound to land us in Solipsism. Gentile opens the first chapter of his Teoria dello Spirito with a reference to Berkeley's doctrine, as at once heralding and obscuring the truth that the esse of the object is in and for and by the subject's act of knowing it. The empirical subject, you as distinct from me, Berkeley as distinct from Gentile, whether thought as a plurality or as the single subject of the Solipsist, is no true subject, for it falls on the object-side of the relation “as one of so many finite objects which are the content of experience.”¹² The true subject, for whom knower and known are one, is infinite, the universal Ego which can never be apprehended statically as an object-entity. Berkeley's idealism was empirical; Gentile's—adopting and clarifying the Kantian distinction—is transcendental.

That in the act of knowing knower and known are identical will be flatly denied by many philosophers on the very ground alleged by Gentile against every alternative doctrine, viz., that it involves an intrinsic contradiction. Knowledge, they will say, is not knowledge unless the object known is what it is known to be independently of the act of knowing it. A knowledge that is creative of its object is not knowledge at all. Those who hold this view—and there are weighty reasons for its adoption—will straightway rule out Gentile's system as fantastical, and take no further heed of it. Others, conscious of the difficulties that beset both these extreme positions, will hesitate to commit themselves to either. Sensible of the manifest imperfections of human thinking, and strong in their conviction of the systematic unity of the universe, they will question whether any finite truth is wholly true, and whether, if knowledge be of the real in its independent being, knowledge is possible at all. Or they may hold that the distinction between thought and things is relative to finite consciousness, but loses all meaning on the plane of Absolute experience. In the divine υοηsιs, υουs, and υοητου are one and the same; God's intuitive understanding is constitutive of the being of its object, creating what it apprehends and apprehending what it creates in a single intellectual act. Formulated thus in the traditional language of Neo-Platonism, such a doctrine presents no inherent paradox. It bears a close resemblance to the very position of Gentile that is under consideration. But there is one all-important difference. What the Platonists affirmed of God, Gentile affirms of the individual human thinker. In the Ego's actual thinking the Universal Spirit has its immanent reality, and nowhere else. The Absolute is the Io, which is myself. By this identification, Gentile throws down the gauntlet in face of the apparent facts, and transfers to the human subject the divine prerogative of intellectual creation. We are thus brought face to face with the second, and crucial, principle of his metaphysic, the concept of the Io universale.

III

Gentile thinks. His thought, say, of the new syllabus of secondary instruction, when viewed by an observer from the outside, or by Gentile himself as an object of introspection, is one of a host of empirical facts that compose his mental biography. So regarded, it is an unalterable datum, set in a context of determinate conditions and consequences in the order of spatio-temporal events. It is pensiero pensato, a thought that has been thought. But in the act of thinking, pensiero pensante, it is an unconditioned creation of the Spirit, embracing all reality in an individual apperception, an eternal moment in the rhythm of the Spirit's life. In this unique moment Gentile and the Spirit are indissolubly one; the empirical object-ego and the empirical object-world are revealed as abstractions, as mutilated products of the Io universale, which alone really thinks. The question before us is whether this view can be maintained.

(A) It is not hard to see what Gentile hopes to gain by the concept of the Io universale. He is out to save the appearances, to vindicate human personality. He has no use for a superpersonal Absolute, to whom finite selves are adjectival, or for Mind with a big M, that transcends, while it inspires, the minds of human individuals. What is hard to see is the manner in which he effects this vindication; how the universal Ego can be an Ego, without either sacrifice of its own absoluteness or absorption of the empirical personality it is designed to save. Gentile's utterances on this question are far from clear. On the one hand, we are told that “it must not be supposed that the concept of this deeper personality of the Person that has no plural, excludes and in effect annuls every concept of the empirical Ego. Idealism does not aspire to be mysticism. The particular individual does not vanish in the bosom of the Ego that is absolutely and veritably real. For this absolute Ego, which is one and which unifies in itself every particular and empirical Ego, unifies indeed, but does not destroy. Rather, the reality of the transcendental Ego carries with it the reality of the empirical, which is conceived wrongly and illegitimately only when severed from its immanent relation with the transcendental Ego.”¹³ Here is unequivocal asseveration of the fact that empirical personalities are preserved, not lost, in the Io universale. How are we to interpret the mode of their preservation? Gentile thinks and Croce thinks; if these statements have any meaning, the otherness of Gentile and Croce and of their respective acts of thought must be maintained in the unity of the universal subject. Croce's thought cannot be Gentile's, nor can Gentile's thought be Croce's; otherwise Croce would simply be Gentile, and Gentile Croce, and their empirical Egos would “vanish in the bosom” of a super-personal Absolute. It is not a question of preserving numerical or spatio-temporal distinctions as such; these have a place only in the abstract world of pensiero pensato. That sheer otherness is aufgehoben in the Spirit's life can be readily understood, for sheer otherness is an Unding, unthinkable even in the extreme moment of objectification, say, in the plain man's naïve assurance of an independent Nature. Even here the subject reveals its presence, not only in the unifying act of judgment, but in its recognition of unity in the very heart of the supposed objective fact. Sociality is found to characterize the empirical actions of men and animals, nor does the hypothesis of the bifurcation of nature preclude the discovery of physical law. Pensiero pensato, for all its abstractness, is pensiero still. But, on the plane of pensiero pensante, what room is there for any otherness save that of the moments in the Spirit's triadic rhythm? “The other,” we are told, “is simply a stage which we must pass, if we are to obey the immanent nature of our spirit; pass, but not stay there.” “L'unità dello spirito è immoltiplicabile.”¹⁴ True, “it is only an abstract multiplicity which is thus excluded by the unity of the Spirit, since that unity is itself multiplicity, a concrete multiplicity displayed in the unity of the spiritual process.”¹⁵ What then is this concrete multiplicity? Surely the multiplicity of thinking minds and acts of thought. So we read that the Critique of Pure Reason can be regarded as “a single spiritual act”¹⁶ in contrast with its empirical location in its temporal context as an historical event; that in the poet of the Orlando Furioso we discern two men, the one, “an object of æsthetic criticism, which contemplates in Ariosto the eternal beauty of his art,” the other, “an object of historical criticism, which contemplates in Ariosto the fact, conditioned in time and space, and intelligible, like all other facts, in relation to its conditions.”¹⁷ Yet, in another passage, Gentile denies that one act can be compared with another, for no act has an ‘other,’ and asserts that “one knowing (sapere) can only be distinguished from another by analysis and abstraction.”¹⁸ “Horace, as a man who was born and died, is dead indeed; his monumentum arises in us, in a ‘We’ (Noi), who, as ‘we’ or subject and immanent act, are not different from that of Horace.”¹⁹ Indeed, it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise; if thinking be judgment, and judgment be unification of differents, the thinker can think only as the transcendental, never as the empirical, Ego. There can be only one thought, one judgment, to which all diversity is internal, viz., the thought and judgment of the universal subject. Gentile, as Gentile, never really thinks. The intrusion of the ‘Noi’ is intolerably ambiguous. Io I know, and Sè (the self-objectification of the Io) I know; but who are ‘we’? Gentile and Croce, in the act of thinking, are one person, “the person that knows no plural.” The identification, be it observed, must be complete; else the Spirit is transcendent of the act of thinking and has lost its title to the name Io. Yet, if complete, what difference remains between this act of Gentile's thought and that of Croce's? Thoughts which are identical with the same thought are identical with one another.

The same confusion may be illustrated from Gentile's analysis of art.²⁰ Art, we read, is “knowledge of self,” the thesis in the dialectic of self-consciousness taken in abstraction from the antithesis, the moment of pure subjectivity in the Spirit's life. The artist recks naught of the limitations which respect for the objective order imposes on the historian. His world is the subjective world of fantasy, a free creation in which he realizes his immediate feeling. Gentile quotes with full approval Croce's well-known doctrine that all art is in its essence lyrical. We may remark by the way how, on Gentile's principles, it seems to follow that the Subjective Idealist is a supreme artist. However that may be, the work of art has its distinctive value as the revelation of the artist's personality. Here arises the question, which personality, the empirical or the universal? “Under which king, Bezonian? speak or die.” We are told that “every work of art is a self-contained individuality, an abstract subjectivity, which stands empirically in juxtaposition to all the rest in atomistic fashion. Every poet has his own æsthetic problem, which he resolves on his own, withdrawing himself from every intrinsic relation with his successors and contemporaries.” This is why art as art has no history. The language points to art as being the creation of the empirical personality of the artist. But that is not Gentile's view, for he insists on the character of impersonality which lifts the work of art to immortality and gives it its appeal to all spirits in all ages as “the very universality of the spirit as Io transcendentale,” and adds with great explicitness, “the personality that must be excluded from art is the character rather of the empirical Ego, of the Itself (Sè) in its withdrawal of itself from the perfect light of self-consciousness, which, on the contrary, must in art prevail in all its dazzling power.” How then, we ask, is Ariosto's poetry Ariosto's, or Leopardi's poetry Leopardi's? And how, if the work of art be created “in the perfect light of self-consciousness,” is the artist to be differentiated from the philosopher?

As we follow Gentile's exposition of the Io universale, we are reminded how Aquinas, in his polemic against the Averroist doctrine of the unity of the Active Intellect, presses home with merciless insistence its necessary consequence, viz. Socrates non cogitat. Like Gentile, Aquinas was concerned to champion the claims of human personality; but, unlike Gentile, he saw clearly their incompatibility with a philosophy of pure immanence. He saw also that such a philosophy was bound to sap the foundations of moral responsibility. So, for Gentile, “on the terrain of experience, all our moral problems arise, precisely through the absolute opposition in which the Ego, empirically regarded, distinguishes itself from all other persons”²¹; though, as he goes on to point out, they admit of solution only on the plane of transcendental personality. But a discussion of Gentile's views on ethics would carry us beyond the limits of this article.

IV

(B) Like difficulties present themselves, when we turn to consider the object-factor in the synthesis. The Io universale is, not subject + object, but subject - object in a union that can only be broken by abstraction. The subject is not the pure subject, the bare One, self-contained and transcendent, of Neo-Platonism, but the act of unification of the manifold; the object is not the pure object, the sheer multiplicity that the Atomists strove vainly to conceive, but the manifold taken up into the act of unification. Yet, for all his protestations to the contrary, Gentile weights the subject-factor in the synthesis heavily against the object. “The multiplicity of the concepts of things can be but the superficial husk of a kernel that is one concept only, the concept of the subject as centre of all the things.”²² Why, indeed, is the synthesis ascribed to the Io, if not to mark the primacy of the subject, in its real identity with the human individual who thinks? We read, it is true, of ‘il mondo assoluto,’ or ‘il tutto,’ of ‘the Sè or Io'; but the emphasis is ever on the Io rather than on the Sè. “It is not possible to conceive thought without personality, because thought … is conceptus sui, i.e. Io.”²³ “But,” Gentile continues, “it is not possible to conceive the thought that has not its bound or point d'appui, because the concept of itself realizes the Sè as object of the knowing.”²⁴ Why then does he not speak of Dio universale? God, for Gentile, is the apotheosis of the object-world in its abstraction; in religious adoration, the Ego proclaims its nothingness in the presence of the non-Ego, thought is petrified before the vision of the Medusa-head of unthinking Nature. We are not here concerned with the truth of this analysis of religious experience, though the moment of self-fruition is surely as vital as that of self-abasement; or with its paradoxical implication that the God of religious worship is identifiable with the hypostatized Nature of scientific realism. Our point is that on the plane of the concrete synthesis Io and Dio are alike one-sided abstractions, and that Gentile is not entitled to describe the life of the Spirit in terms of one rather than of the other. His preference for the word Io blurs the true meaning of his doctrine, that the Spirit is in reality Io-Dio, the God making himself Man, the Man making himself God. A like emphasis is laid upon the subject as against the object on the empirical plane. The empirical Io gives a clue to the recognition of the transcendental Io, in a way that has no analogue on the side of the empirical object. As a pure manifold, the object is wholly unthinkable; whereas the empirical subject is pensiero, and preserves its truth as such in the unifying synthesis. Moreover, even when objectified, it is thought as pensiero pensante (i.e. as thinker); and thus there arises, within the object-world, a distinction between percipients and percepta, between persons and things. The matter is full of difficulties, which we cannot here discuss in detail. Chief among them is the problem of space and time. The object-world is a world of (abstract) multiplicity, and “whoever says multiplicity, says therewith space and time.” “All that we distinguish or are capable of distinguishing, and therefore of positing, in an actual experience is spatial.” Space, for Gentile, implies “the reciprocal exclusion of all the terms of actual or possible experience.”²⁵ Time, on his view, is a further “spatialization of the unity of space,” a “specification of spatiality”; for reciprocal exclusion (spatiality) breaks out within the unitary spatial element, i.e. the point, which can only be thought as one, if thought as persisting through a multiplicity of instants.²⁶ It follows that the empirical Ego is not merely temporal but spatial. The thought which is not spatial is that of the universal subject. “It is to be observed that we are not in space and time; rather space and time, all that is spatially displayed and is graded in temporal succession, is in us: in the Ego, be it clearly understood, which is not empirical, but transcendental.”²⁷ This application of the doctrine of simple location to consciousness widens the gulf that parts the empirical from the universal self. It raises the question whether both alike are not ideal limits, between which hovers ambiguously the actual self which thinks. Gentile's theory furnishes an interesting illustration of the “meeting of extremes” of Absolute Idealism and present-day Realism, with its insistence on the integration of time and space and on the view that the basis of consciousness is to be found in spatio-temporal reality. We note, also, the implied criticism of Bergson's durée réelle; since, for Gentile, abstract time is resolved, not in empirically lived duration, but in the “eternal present” of the pure act, that posits time and space as its creations. Postponing for the moment Gentile's concept of the eternal present, it is hard to understand the process of resolution. If time be unthinkable and utterly unreal, the sheer negation of spirit, how can it maintain its rights in the act of synthesis? Gentile's answer, that the Spirit as becoming contains within itself its own negation, raises a fresh difficulty, which will have to be considered presently, namely, how what is purely negative can function constructively in the dialectical process and enter as a positive constituent into the life of the Spirit. In any case, the position that the world of facts and things is sheer nonentity, except for what it owes to the thinking subject, while following logically from Gentile's principles, is hardly reconcilable with the existence of a scientific knowledge that claims to build upon that world as a reality. If nothing is, save the becoming of the Spirit, how did the illusory belief in the independent being of Nature ever arise? Philosophies of pure immanence have a way of relegating to the realm of appearance what, on their theory of reality, could never conceivably appear. The truth is that Gentile's pensiero pensato corresponds to nothing in our actual thinking of the world of objects. Thought is never purely analytic and tautologous, but retains its intrinsic nature as synthetic even in its apprehension of scientific or historical fact. Moreover, when we turn to consider the synthesis and hold fast to the element of otherness and of the non-Ego as genuinely preserved, the Spirit is as truly fact as it is act. Gentile's theory is, strictly, not a theory of the Spirit as pure act, but of the Spirit as pure act-fact, Io-Dio. In each pair of appelations the members are more than coequal with one another; they are identical. The All (il tutto) is, or rather becomes, the subject, as the subject becomes the All. “Tutto in noi, tutto, cioè, noi.”²⁸ Hence, as the subject is one in all acts of thinking, so the object-world, in its truth in the unity of the subject, is one also. There is no place left for the distinction of one branch of knowledge from another. When Gentile identifies philosophy and history with history of philosophy as the mediating term, understanding by philosophy thinking in its concrete development and by history the concrete development of thinking, he does more than deny the severance of the study of fact from that of value; he merges the two disciplines in one. How, on the grounds alleged, can he resist the identification of all the sciences in that of philosophy-history? He allows, it is true, a real distinction, arising directly from the Spirit's dialectic, between art, the expression of the pure subject, science and religion, the expressions of the pure object, and philosophy-history, the expression of the subject-object unity. Over and above the manifest arbitrariness of the several identifications, the doctrine implies denial of an independent status to art and religion, which call for resolution in philosophy-history, the only form of knowledge that is completely true. Certainly in absolute and perfect knowledge, if knowledge it be called, all these distinctions would be completely unified. But such knowledge is not that of finite thinkers. “Such is not our rank and condition.” Gentile, however, thinks otherwise, and the result is the paradox in question. In the end, as all thinkers are one thinker, so all knowledges are one knowledge. Where the All thinks the All, and the One the One, it is idle to draw invidious distinctions.

V

(C) Consider next the movement of thought by which consciousness comes to itself as self-consciousness. Gentile tells us that this ascent has to be made laboriously; in the ordo cognoscendi, at all events, the Io universale is not immediately given, but is to be found only by those who seek. Moreover, were it given, there would be no room for the empirical Io; all thinking would be transacted directly by the universal Io. What, then, is the prima facie datum from which we start, and which is revealed to subsequent reflection as no brute presupposition, but as a moment in the dialectic of the Spirit? It should surely be the moment of pure subjectivity, the thesis in the triadic rhythm. But we have seen that the empirical Ego, the supposed datum, never really thinks; that it falls, even as empirical subject—the percipiens, e.g., of Berkeley's Idealism—within pensiero pensato, as one among an indefinite multiplicity of finite objects. Moreover, men do not in fact embark on their philosophical pilgrimage as uncritical Subjectivists; their starting-point is rather the antithesis, the belief in the independent reality of the object-world. The immediate datum is the empirical Ego as it finds itself in presence of empirical objects. In either case, they are victims of abstraction, and Gentile asserts emphatically that “from the abstract to the concrete there is no passage.”²⁹ “It is not the thesis that renders possible the synthesis, but contrariwise the synthesis that renders possible the thesis, creating it together with its antithesis, i.e. creating itself. And therefore the pure act is self-creation (autoctisi).”³⁰ Gentile is of course speaking here of the real order of becoming, not of the empirical ordo cognoscendi; but the difficulty lies precisely in this, that his epistemology and his ontology inevitably and unaccountably diverge. Take the real process: it falls wholly within the unity of subject-object, which is present implicitly, first in the thesis, then in the antithesis, and achieves explicit recognition in the synthesis. Thus all is deduced from self-conscious Spirit; when being has been resolved into becoming, we see, in Lotze's quaint expression, “how being is made.” But, since the entire process is that of human thinking, how else can it be exemplified save as the manner in which men actually come to know? Nor is the converse process, from the concrete to the abstract, any easier to understand. How can thought, of its own nature, posit a pure object which is thought's negation? And how can thought recover from this act of self-abandonment and achieve a thinking that is a synthesis of thinking and non-thinking? The synthesis can hardly be identical with one of the terms synthesized, nor the thesis and the antithesis at once be identical with and opposite to one another. Gentile's criticism on Hegel's famous first triad surely recoils upon himself.³¹ The confusion is only disguised when the thesis is stated as the pure subject, the antithesis as the pure object, the synthesis as subject-object in their unity. For what is the pure subject of the thesis? If it be the empirical subject, this, we are told, is a denizen of the object-world, falling under the antithesis. If it is the Io universale, it is identical with the subject-object of the synthesis. Thus pensiero pensante is either the self-consciousness of the Spirit or a misnomer for pensiero pensato. Gentile will doubtless reply that this is to misinterpret the dialectic in terms of static moments and to forget that reality is not Being, but Becoming. The synthesis is in the making at each stage of the process, and is never wholly made. The Io is ever achieving self-realization, but its goal, pure υοηsιs υοηsεωs, is nowhere achieved. “There is no felicity save in proceeding.” To think finality is to think—were such a thought thinkable—the Spirit's death. Let us follow out the implications of this doctrine. They are set forth with uncompromising assurance in the sixteenth chapter of the Teoria generale.³² The Spirit is real only through the presence within itself of its own negation. Non-being, error, and evil are the nutriment from which it draws its life. “Without error there would in fact be no truth, without evil no good, … because error and evil are the non-being of that Spirit,which is indeed truth and goodness, but on the condition that it makes itself, conquering this its internal enemy, consuming it, and hence ever needing it to conquer and consume, as the flame has need of the combustible.”³³ Thus the problems of error and evil are the same as that of Nature; they reflect the moment of objectivity, and, like Nature, are taken up into the unity of the Spirit. The realm of disvalue, be it noted, coincides exactly with the realm of fact. In this process Gentile sees a triumphant progress, the instauration of the regnum hominis, the kingdom of man. It furnishes “the empirical and external representation of the immanent eternal victory (full and absolute victory) of the Spirit over nature.”³⁴ Can we endorse this panegyric without qualification? Is it not, with equal truth, a representation of full and absolute defeat? The life of the Spirit is no more true than false, no more good than bad. Truth and error, goodness and evil, are alike essential to its becoming, and, in the synthesis which is reality, are alike conserved, not merely as correlatives, but as self-identical. “Error is error,” says Gentile, “in so far as it is overcome.”³⁵ But the like holds also of truth. Were error to vanish, truth, so far from shining forth in untarnished splendour, would have perished for lack of proper nutriment. Where then is intellectual progress? Nor is moral progress in better plight. If goodness be goodness solely through its self-creation of evil, what sense can we attach to the assertion of man's “infinite responsibility” for the use he makes of the Spirit's gifts?³⁶ The pretended progress is but a stream of cyclical recurrences, wherein advance alternates endlessly with retrogression, the temporal reflection of an eternal act.

What is this eternal act? It is an act in which the whole series of events in time are gathered up and transmuted as “compresent in the temporalizing act of the Spirit.”³⁷ “Compresence is the convergence of all the moments of time (past, present, future, in their infinite distinctions and resulting multiplications) in a present, which is no longer a present stationed between past and future, but negation of all temporal multiplicity and all succession.”³⁸ A negation, be it understood, which is also affirmation; for the eternal is not other than time, including and transcending it, but is “time itself considered in the actuality of the Spirit.”³⁹ The storia eternale is identical with the storia which unfolds itself in time. As we read this language, recollections of Hegel and Spinoza, and, beyond these, of mediæval Platonism, crowd upon the mind. It is of vital importance to grasp clearly what is distinctive in this, the crowning conception of Gentile's Idealism. The temporal process is not (a) a progress ad indefinitum. For Gentile, as for Bradley, “endless progress is progress without an end, is endless incompleteness, endless immorality.”⁴⁰ But neither is it (b) the progress which Bradley, following Hegel, advocates as rational, the progress “to an end which is completeness” and which abides above and beyond time. Such a consummation would involve transcendence. Gentile's progress is (c) synthesized in an “eternal present,” which, as act of the Spirit, is itself a process and a history, which itself ‘becomes’ and never ‘is.’ Thus all history is contemporary history, and exists only in the historian's (i.e. the philosopher-historian's) act of thinking it. It is meaningless to speak of the unrecorded past, for the past as such is non-existent; to ask, What really happened? is to start on the vain quest of the Ding an sich.

Can we attach any meaning to this doctrine? It is true that the distinction of fact and value breaks down upon reflection, and with it the severance, save for purposes of scientific economy, of history from the philosophy of history. It is true, again, that the distinction between philosophy itself and history is, like every other distinction among branches of knowledge, relative to finite human thinking. Once more, it is true that the whole matter of history is, in a sense, compresent to the mind of the historian who thinks it. The undecipherable inscription, even the unrecorded past, is envisaged by him as such, and is thus far neither undecipherable nor unrecorded. But this is not to assert, with Gentile, that the act of knowing is identical with the object known. The facts are not rendered unintelligible by a refusal to accept this revolutionary principle. They may be real beyond his thinking of them, and yet, as falling within the Spirit that transcends the individual subject and embraces all subjects and all objects within its scope, may be flesh of his flesh, life of his life. And there are further difficulties to be met. By what effort of thought can we conceive the future—to say nothing of the past—as comprised within the Ego's present act of knowing? Let the ‘present’ be as timeless as you please, is it possible to exclude plurality of acts from an eternal present that is all-inclusive of reality? Again, if the eternal act is a history, can it be other than an event? Yet an event that is timeless, as occupying the whole of time, is surely inconceivable. Does not the eternal present prove on consideration to be not eternal, but momentary, the apotheosis of a single temporal instant? And, lastly, what value can we attach to an experience in which reality, truth, and goodness are eternally to be made, unmade, remade? In the eternal act value and disvalue alike enjoy full prerogatives, through a synthesis which, being both, is really neither.

VI

(D) The Io universale is pure thought, and as thought is translucent to thought; it is, in a word, self-consciousness making itself explicit to itself in its own act. Moreover, its act is the act of my actual human personality. How then can I fail to know it through and through? Gentile's philosophy, if it stands for anything, stands for the repudiation of the unknowable. So we are told again and again; and philosophy after philosophy is arraigned at the bar of this tribunal and found guilty of harbouring the Ding an sich. Even Hegel, when he passes from the Idea to Nature, discloses his secret complicity in the crime. Gentile alone is uncontaminated, for he proclaims not merely that all reality is knowable, but that all reality is known. Is he justified in this high claim? or does it break down under examination? Can he confront the world with a clear conscience? Has he not dethroned the Ding an sich from its secular lordship over other speculative systems, to establish it, under the name and style of the Io universale, as sovereign in his own? This final question remains to be answered. We must bear in mind that the issue cannot be determined by his bare assertions, but by their coherence, one with another and with the governing principles of his philosophy.

If the Io universale is knowable, it can be known; and how can it be known? Not immediately, as we have already seen; and Gentile is never weary of polemic against the intrusion of immediacy. Nor by mediate inference, for “from the abstract to the concrete there is no passage.” If it be a conclusion from premisses, it must be capable of formulation as a proposition. But the moment this is done, it ceases to be an act of pensiero pensante and falls within pensiero pensato. To think it, that is to say, is to think it, not as itself, but as an object. It is offered for our acceptance as a concept, as the sole concept; but the pure act is not a concept, nor is any concept the pure act. As pure act it defies resolution into fact; try the rash experiment, and its indignant protest rings clear and loud: “Is thy servant a dog that it should ‘be’ this ‘thing’?” It cannot, then, be known. “To know is to distinguish one thing from another: omnis determinatio est negatio.”⁴¹ All knowledge implies objectification; knowledge of the Io universale is knowledge; therefore knowledge of the Io universale implies objectification. But, being pure act, the Io universale transcends objectification; it therefore also transcends knowledge.⁴²

We may state the matter thus: Reality (the act of the self-conscious subject) is not the knowable (objective fact), and the knowable is not the real. Yet the whole purport of the system is to establish their identity, to resolve the object, which as static Being is unreal and unknowable, in the act of the subject which is both knowable and real. But the act of the subject can be known only through objectification, which destroys at once its knowability and its reality. Subject, object, and their synthesis are thus alike unknowable; and the sole fruit of the immanent dialectic is the act of faith which affirms “not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible.” Thus does Gentile's metaphysic suffer shipwreck on an inward inconsistency. There can be no “theory” of the Spirit. The title of his book—Teoria generale dello Spirito come puro atto—is a contradiction in terms.

Let us turn to what he has to tell us of the manner in which the pure act is apprehended. It must be lived in order to be known. Throw yourself, such is his exhortation, into “the living experience of the spiritual life”; then, and then only, will you grasp its nature.⁴³ Then, and then only, abstractions dissolve, “and the dialectic of the real will appear evident and certain, as is evident and certain to each of us the consciousness of that which thinks.”⁴⁴ The vision of spiritual reality is penetrable to the eye of faith.⁴⁵ “What is the import of this unity,” he asks, “this fellow-feeling, which is the condition of all spiritual intercourse, i.e. of the knowledge of the Spirit, so different … in kind from that of simple, so-called material, Nature? We must make ourselves one with the soul we desire to know, … and that soul can only meet within our soul what is its own proper subjectivity; as life of our life, where, within our soul, distinction involves nothing that opposes it.”⁴⁶ It is apprehended, not by discursive thinking, but by intellectual intuition, hardly to be won in face of the allurements of popular and scientific abstractions; an “intuition of the spiritual life, wherein in its most living moments it finds a standard and an inspiration to science and to virtue, which, as they fill the soul the more, cause to vibrate more strongly the tense chords of our inward energies.”⁴⁷

In the closing chapter of the Teoria generale, entitled “Idealismo o Misticismo,” Gentile directly confronts the charge of mysticism. His friend Benedetto Croce had objected that in the immediate intuition of the individual-universal all distinctions vanish, and that the issue is a mysticism “admirably adapted to the feeling of oneself in unity with God, but ill suited to thinking the world and acting in it.”⁴⁸ If, on the other hand, the factor of diversity be conserved, the simplicity of the pure act is shattered into fragments. Gentile replies by denying the immediacy of self-consciousness and reasserting the reality of the differences which it posits by its act. “Idealism,” he writes, “resolves all the distinctions, but does not, like mysticism, cancel them; it affirms the finite no less resolutely than the infinite, difference no less resolutely than identity.”⁴⁹ As we have shown above, it is difficult to substantiate this assertion. For additional confirmation of our criticism, we would point to Gentile's admitted failure to give positive characterization to the act of the Spirit. “All the attributes by which we distinguish the Spirit lead us, even against our will, to substantialize it.” It resists every attempt at definition; for to define is to petrify, to translate mobility into immobility. “How can we define and conceive the truth, without imprisoning it in a form that is limited and circumscribed?” And, once again, “The unity of the Spirit, which lives in such an intuition, has been noted more or less clearly by all philosophers, but never, perhaps, precisely expounded in its real nature: unità immoltiplicabile è infinita.”⁵⁰Not multiplicable, not finite, not any assignable attribute; what have we here, in the last resort, but the time-honoured via negativa of the mystics?

We are not discussing on its merits the claim of intellectual intuition to rank as a form of knowledge, or even suggesting that mediate thinking avails of itself to reveal the truth about the real. Reason is a wider term than ratiocination, and within its field has room for the vision of speculative imagination. All along the ages philosophy has found itself impelled, as the consummation of its intellectual labour, to posit a unifying principle that transcends logical mediation. Such was the One of Neo-Platonism, the source of all being and of all value; such, again, was the Infinite Substance, the Deus sive Natura, of Spinoza; objects, in both cases, apprehensible by no mere discursive processes, but by an amor intellectualis that is an act at once of reason and of faith. Such also, as we have seen, is the Io universale of Gentile. But, if it be such, the admission of immediacy is fatal to the main purpose of his system; for it involves the admission of the transcendent, and the transcendent is precisely what Gentile claims to have destroyed.

VII

The root of all the difficulties above mentioned lies in Gentile's identification of the Spirit with the present act of human thinking. The universal cannot be equivalent to now this, now that, among its particulars. Immanent in each, it must yet, as universal, transcend each. Gentile would doubtless repel this criticism as a travesty of his doctrine; but we believe that, for all his protestations to the contrary, it is unanswerable. In his Meeting of Extremes, Bosanquet distinguishes, with reference to Gentile, two forms of transcendence, which he calls respectively transcendence of immediacy and transcendence of experience. Gentile denies both. Whether a sound philosophy of the Spirit involves transcendence of experience, whether, as Platonism maintains, the supreme Reality, while immanent in, is yet above and beyond the universe and the finite minds that are therein, is an issue that lies outside the scope of this paper. Our contention has been that it implies transcendence of the immediate act of thought. The Absolute of Hegel or of Bradley may not prove to be the last word in metaphysics, but at least it can hold its ground against the Io universale of Gentile.

That there is truth in Gentile's analysis, if we confine ourselves to the actual facts of human knowing, is undeniable. Man's thinking life, as we find it, is ever incomplete, his knowledge riddled with ignorance, his truth with error. In his moral life, likewise, right is done and goodness realized in and through the conflict with evil. But can we ascribe these features of finite experience to the ultimate reality? That the sorry strivings of our own thought and will reveal the inmost heart of the universal Spirit, the essence of its self-conscious life; that the only Absolute is that whose absoluteness consists wholly of this Maelström of relativity; this is a doctrine indeed which, if credible, would present a hideous mockery of our aspirations. The price to be paid is heavy, yet, if the theory be true, it must be paid without demur. The only relevant criticism is that it proves on examination to be unintelligible. We have seen that Gentile fails to explain the relation of the empirical to the universal Ego, or to give a clear answer to the question: who, in this concrete act of thinking, can truly be said to think? We have seen, again, that he fails to show how multiplicity, the mark of the object, is preserved in synthesis with the subject, or to justify our accredited knowledge of the objective world. We have seen, further, that he fails to account for the dialectic process, the passage of thought from thesis to synthesis, and vice versa. The empirical Ego realizes itself as the universal Ego; but the former is a static object, unthinkable and unreal; the latter an ideal whose realization would be its death. The living thinker is left, circling restlessly, like a squirrel in a cage, between two abstractions, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.” Finally, we have seen that the pure act, which, as the self-conscious Ego, was to reveal itself as the self-luminous truth of all our thinking, veils itself, as we draw near to grasp it, in a cloud of mystery. If this be the issue of the new Idealism, have we not some cause for hesitation in yielding it our allegiance? Self-realization cannot be the final word in metaphysics. May it not be wiser to follow the more beaten track of those who teach that man's spiritual endeavour can only be understood, if it be found to draw its motive and its meaning from a reality that transcends the process of becoming, and therewith transcends the self?

Notes

1. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro,³ p. 206. All references, save where otherwise stated, are from this book, the most complete presentment of Gentile's philosophy. The Translation by Dr. Wildon Carr has been frequently used by the writer in quotations.

2. P. 205.

3. P. 217.

4. Pp. 16, 17.

5. P. 16.

6. P. 237.

7. Meeting of Extremes, p. 20.

8. P. 11.

9. P. 207, cf. p. 107, “tutto in noi, tutto, cioè, noi.”

10. P. 76, cf. p. 78.

11. p. 213.

12. P. 5.

13. P. 13.

14. Pp. 11, 23.

15. P. 94.

16. P. 225. Cf. the twofold alterità, outside of and within the Spirit, that differentiates “history as Nature” from true history, pp. 222-225.

17. P. 173.

18. P. 226.

19. P. 129.

20. Pp. 187-192.

21. P. 12.

22. P. 206.

23. P. 213.

24. Ibid.

25. Pp. 98, 99.

26. Pp. 101, 119.

27. Pp. 99, 107.

28. P. 107.

29. P. 219.

30. L'atto del pensare come atto puro, p. 41, cited by de Ruggiero, La filosofia contemporanea, 2nd ed., ii, 171.

31. Pp. 46, 47.

32. Esp. pp. 208-212.

33. Pp. 210-211.

34. P. 214.

35. P. 209.

36. P. 216.

37. P. 109.

38. P. 110.

39. P. 177.

40. Ethical Studies, 2nd ed., p. 235 note.

41. P. 27.

42. P. 27.

43. P. 22.

44. P. 48.

45. Pp. 7, 21.

46. Pp. 7, 8.

47. P. 23.

48. P. 227, note.

49. P. 228.

50. Pp. 21-23.