Giovanni Gentile | |
|---|---|
 Gentile in the 1930s | |
| President of the Royal Academy of Italy | |
| In office 25 July 1943 – 15 April 1944 | |
| Monarch | Victor Emmanuel III |
| Preceded by | Luigi Federzoni |
| Succeeded by | Giotto Dainelli Dolfi |
| Minister of Public Education | |
| In office 31 October 1922 – 1 July 1924 | |
| Prime Minister | Benito Mussolini |
| Preceded by | Antonino Anile [it] |
| Succeeded by | Alessandro Casati |
| Member of the Senate of the Kingdom | |
| In office 5 November 1922 – 5 August 1943 | |
| Appointed by | Victor Emmanuel III |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1875-05-30)30 May 1875 Castelvetrano, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 15 April 1944(1944-04-15) (aged 68) Florence, Kingdom of Italy |
| Manner of death | Assassination by gunshot |
| Resting place | Santa Croce, Florence, Italy |
| Political party | National Fascist Party (1923–1943) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 6, includingFederico |
| Alma mater | Scuola Normale Superiore[1] University of Florence[1] |
| Signature |  |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Neo-Hegelianism |
| Main interests | Metaphysics,dialectics,pedagogy |
| Notable works | |
| Notable ideas | Actual idealism,fascism,immanentism (method of immanence)[2] |
| Part of a series on |
| Hegelianism |
|---|
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Giovanni Gentile (/dʒɛnˈtiːleɪ/jen-TEE-lay;Italian:[dʒoˈvannidʒenˈtiːle]; 30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italianpedagogue, philosopher, and politician.
He, alongsideBenedetto Croce, was one of the major exponents ofItalian idealism inItalian philosophy, and also devised his own system of thought, which he called "actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition".
Described by himself and byBenito Mussolini as the "philosopher of fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation forItalian fascism, notably through writing the 1925Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, and part of the 1932 "The Doctrine of Fascism" with Mussolini. AsMinister for Public Education, he introduced in 1923 the so-calledGentile Reform, the first major piece of legislation passed by the Fascist government, which would last in some capacity until 1962. He also helped found theInstitute of the Italian Encyclopedia withGiovanni Treccani, and was its first editor.
Though his political influence waned as Mussolinisought the alliance of theCatholic Church in the late 1920s, which conflicted with Gentile'ssecularism, he remained a faithful Fascist, even after the 1943armistice with the Allies, and followed Mussolini into theItalian Social Republic. He was murdered in 1944 bypartisans of theItalian resistance.
Gentile was born inCastelvetrano, Italy. He was inspired byRisorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such asMazzini,Rosmini,Gioberti, andSpaventa from whom he borrowed the idea ofautoctisi, "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought – namelyKarl Marx,Hegel, andFichte, with whom he shared the ideal of creating aWissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science), a theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions.Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche'sÜbermensch and Gentile'sUomo Fascista.[3] In religion he presented himself as aCatholic (of sorts), and emphasisedactual idealism's Christian heritage; Antonio G. Pesce insists that «there is in fact no doubt that Gentile was a Catholic»; and Gentile once spoke of "his"atheism only in reference to the accusation of atheism leveled against him,[4][5] although he maintained until the end that he was culturally Catholic.[6]
Gentile thought that God is immanent in the act of thinking, not a separate transcendent entity.[7]
He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigiousScuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty ofHumanities.
In 1898 he graduated in Letters and Philosophy with a dissertation titledRosmini eGioberti, that he realized under the supervision of Donato Jaja, a disciple ofBertrando Spaventa.[8]
During his academic career, Gentile served in a number of positions, including:
A long-time collaborator ofBenedetto Croce, the two first became friends in 1896 and remained close until 1925, when Croce sided against fascism and Gentile for it with theirManifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals andManifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals respectively.[9][10]
Gentile was largely uninvolved with politics prior to the outbreak ofWorld War One; he saw himself as a conservative liberal in the vein ofCavour, but mostly concerned himself with writing on the matters of education.[11] Like many Italians, however, the war marked the start of more active involvement in politics, and publicly declared himself for Italy's intervention in the war after the disastrousBattle of Caporetto in 1917, though was privately one from the outbreak of the war.[12] He saw the war as the emergence of a new Italy, which had to fight and destroy the "easy-going, idle Italy", "known for its faint-hearted nature, its individualism, its poor sense of taste and its tendency to withdraw into private egoism"; it was a chance to complete theRisorgimento and uphold its ideals.[13]
Despite his ardent support of the war, he remained staunch in his criticism of the extreme nationalists such asEnrico Corradini and theItalian Nationalist Association for their rejection of liberalism.[14] By the end of the war in 1918, he was attacking much of the Italian political sphere: theSocialists and the Catholics of the futurePopular Party for their opposition to the national state; theVatican as a hostile independent power opposed to the existence of Italy; and the liberaltrasformismo ofGiovanni Giolitti and theItalian Parliament, marred by endless squabbling, and now an outdated relic in the face of the "new Italy" birthed by the experience of war.[15]
Gentile was indignant at the rejection of Italy's claims, set out in the 1915Treaty of London, at theParis Peace Conference. Not only did it fail to respect the hard-fought gains of the "new Italy", but it encouraged fatalism, liberal back-biting, and the questioning of the ideals of intervention in the first place—that is, of the spiritual invigoration that Gentile saw as the most significant consequence of the war.[16] As such, he would support the ultranationalist poetGabriele D'Annunzio's 1919occupation of Fiume,[17] which was an important precursor toFascism.[18] Nonetheless, he continued to believe in liberal democracy and praised the new Prime Minister,Francesco Saverio Nitti, for his commitment to national economic recovery.[19] As the post-war period wore on, Gentile saw no sign of the spiritual revolution within Italian liberal society that he had hoped for, and became increasingly disillusioned; he disengaged with active politics in 1920 and would not return to it untilBenito Mussolini's 1922 seizure of power in theMarch on Rome,[20] by which point fascist doctrine was largely complete.[21]
In 1922, on the recommendation ofBenedetto Croce, who had refused the role himself, Gentile was namedMinister for Public Education for the government ofBenito Mussolini.[22] The cabinet, though stronglyright-wing, was broadly non-partisan;[23] Gentile's inclusion, alongside several other notable non-fascists, was taken as a sign of reconciliation and the promised return to law-and-order.[24] He officially joined theNational Fascist Party in 1923.[25]
In his capacity as Minister for Public Education, he instituted the 1923Gentile Reform, which was the first major reform of the education system since theUnification of Italy and theCasati Law [it][26][27] Despite lacking any substantial education policy prior to coming to power, it was the first significant piece of legislation of the Fascist regime; Mussolini described it as the "most Fascist reform".[28]
Based on philosophically idealist and conservativeelitist ideas, it was designed to help form the new elite of Fascist society[29] and to reduce the number of intellectual graduates saturating the job market.[30]
An additional purpose of the reform was to improve the regime's relationship with theCatholic Church. It made religious instruction mandatory in junior schools, gave equal distinction to private (notably Catholic) and state schools, and allowed both to sit the same qualification exams for entrance into higher education; these were important elements of the programme of the CatholicPopular party, and did much to shore up Catholic opinion of the Fascist regime—a long-standing problem for Italian governments due to theRoman Question—as part of a wider programme of concessions by Mussolini to the Vatican.[27][31] However, it did not go far enough to completely please the Church. Complaints remained over the fact that religious teaching was neither given by priests nor extended beyond the junior schools.[27][32]
Included in this reform was an attempt to limit the number of women teachers in schools, part of Italian Fascism's wider campaign againstfeminism, suggesting that:
Women do not have, nor will they ever have, either the moral or mental vigor to teach in those schools which formed the ruling class of the country.[33]
The reform also mandated that Italian was the only language to be used in public schools, severely impacting the autonomy of non-Italian speaking minorities—known asallogeni—particularly in the regions ofAlto-Adige and theJulian March, recently annexed in theTreaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye following the First World War.[34]
Under Gentile's reform, the secondary school system was substantially reorganised. The technical schools (scuola technica), relied on by the middle class for educational attainment and in which pupil numbers had increased rapidly since 1900, were abolished. In their place were "complementary schools" (scuola complementare), general education schools which did not allow access to universities or further qualifications.[35] Entry into particular fields, such asscience andengineering, were restricted to other specialised secondary schools. The curriculum was also rearranged, emphasising thehumanities and especiallyphilosophy; teaching ofLatin was also more widely introduced.[36]
Pupil numbers were successfully reduced under Gentile's new system. Secondary school student numbers dropped from 337,000 to 237,000 between 1923 and 1926–27, and university students by 13,000, from 53,000 in 1919–20 to 40,000 in 1928–29. Enrollment in the technical schools, and the complementary schools that replaced them, dropped by half from 1922–23 to 1923–24.[37]
The reform, which had produced a system far more complicated than before, proved unpopular. After Gentile left his position in 1924, it would be gradually dismantled by his successors;[32] the "complementary schools" were abolished in 1930, and in 1939 then-Minister for EducationGiuseppe Bottai made further sweeping changes to the education system.[38]
He resigned his position in 1924 during theMatteotti Crisis.Christopher Seton-Watson suggested it was in protest of the murder ofGiacomo Matteotti;[39] Gabriele Turi disputes this, writing instead that the purpose of his resignation was to reinforce the Fascist regime and relieve Mussolini's cabinet of his own unpopular presence.[40]
In 1925, Gentile headed two constitutional commissions that helped establish the corporate state of Fascism as part of theExceptional Fascist Laws [it], and was a member of theFascist Grand Council from 1925 to 1929.[41]
Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as "the philosopher of Fascism"; he was theghostwriter of the first part of the essay "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), attributed to Mussolini.[42] It was first published in 1932, in theItalian Encyclopedia, wherein he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory statecorporatism,Philosopher Kings, the abolition of theparliamentary system, andautarky. He also wrote theManifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals which was signed by a number of writers and intellectuals, includingLuigi Pirandello,Gabriele D'Annunzio,Filippo Tommaso Marinetti andGiuseppe Ungaretti.
Gentile's political influence in the regime waned in the late 1920s. He lost favour for remarking that fascism was a minority movement and was further sidelined following theLateran Treaty, with hisanti-clericalism no longer appropriate if the regime was to maintain the support of theCatholic Church.[43] Gentile remained loyal to Mussolini, however, and continued to support him even after thefall of the Fascist government in 1943, following him in the establishment of theRepublic of Salò, a puppet state ofNazi Germany, and accepted an appointment in its government despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws. Gentile was the last president of theRoyal Academy of Italy (1943–1944).[44]
On 30 March 1944, Gentile received death threats blaming him for the execution of theMartyrs of Campo di Marte by Republic of Salò troops and accusing him of promoting fascism.[45] Only two weeks later, on 15 April 1944,Bruno Fanciullacci and Antonio Ignesti, both of whom belonged to thecommunist partisan organisationGruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), approached Gentile in his parked car, hiding pistols behind a book. When Gentile lowered the car window to speak to them, he was immediately hit with several bullets to the chest and heart, killing him. Fanciullacci was killed several months later as he tried to escape capture.[40][46]
Gentile's assassination divided the anti-fascist front. It was disapproved of by theTuscan branch of theCLN with the sole exception of theItalian Communist Party, which approved the assassination and claimed responsibility for it.[47]
Gentile was buried in the church ofSanta Croce inFlorence.[48]
Patrick Romanell, philosopher and translator of the work ofBenedetto Croce, wrote that Gentile "holds the honor of having been the most rigorousneo-Hegelian in the entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy."[49] Gentile's philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding ofontology andepistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection ofindividualism and acceptance ofcollectivism, with thestate as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty outside of which individuality had no meaning (and which in turn helped justify thetotalitarian dimension of fascism).[50]
Gentile enjoyed fruitful intellectual relations with Croce from 1899 – and particularly during their joint editorship ofLa Critica from 1903 to 1922 – but broke philosophically and politically from Croce in the early 1920s over Gentile's embrace of fascism. (Croce assesses their philosophical disagreement inUna discussione tra filosofi amici inConversazioni Critiche, II.)
Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds were not to be considered as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed by all former kinds of government, including capitalism andcommunism; and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of corporatism, a fascist state, could defeat these problems which are made fromreifying as an external reality that which is in fact, to Gentile, only a reality in thinking. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Gentile postulated (after Hegel) the opposite, that the subject is concrete and the object a mere abstraction (or rather, that what was conventionally dubbed "subject" is in fact only conditional object, and that the true subject is theact of being or essence of the object).
Gentile was, because of hisactualist system, a notable philosophical presence across Europe during his time. At its base, Gentile's brand of idealism asserted the primacy of the "pure act" of thinking. This act is foundational to all human experience – itcreates the phenomenal world – and involves a process of "reflective awareness" (in Italian, "l'atto del pensiero, pensiero pensante") that is constitutive of the Absolute and revealed in education.[51] Gentile's emphasis on seeing Mind as the Absolute signalled his "revival of the idealist doctrine of the autonomy of the mind."[52] It also connected his philosophical work to his vocation as a teacher. In actual idealism, then, pedagogy istranscendental and provides the process by which the Absolute is revealed.[44] His idea of a transcendingtruth above positivism garnered particular attention by emphasizing that all modes of sensation only take the form of ideas within one's mind; in other words, they are mental constructs. To Gentile, for example, even the correlation of the function and location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body was merely a consistent creation of the mind, and not of the brain (itself a creation of the mind). Observations like this have led some commentators to view Gentile's philosophy as a kind of "absolutesolipsism," expressing the idea "that only the spirit or mind is real".[53]
Actual idealism also touches on ideas of concern totheology. An example of actual idealism in theology is the idea that although man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make God any less real in any possible sense, so long as God is not presupposed to exist as abstraction, and except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (i.e. being invented apart from the thinking that makes it) are presupposed. Benedetto Croce objected that Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other thanSchopenhauer'swill.[54]
Therefore, Gentile proposed a form of what he called "absoluteImmanentism" in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process. Many times accused of solipsism, Gentile maintained his philosophy to be aHumanism that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was colligate in perception; the self's human thinking, in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore not modelled as objects to one's own thinking. Whereassolipsism would feel trapped in the realization of its solitude, actualism rejects such privation and is an expression of the only freedom which is possible within objective contingencies, where the transcendental Self does not even exist as an object, and the dialectical co-substantiation of others necessary to understand the empirical self is felt as true others when found to be the nonrelativistic subjectivity of that whole self and essentially unified with the spirit of such higher selfin actu, where others can be truly known, rather than thought as windowless monads.
A number of developments in Gentile's thought and career helped to define his philosophy, including:
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Gentile considered Fascism the fulfilment of the Risorgimento ideals,[56] particularly those represented byGiuseppe Mazzini[57] and theHistorical Right party.[58]
Gentile sought to make his philosophy the basis for Fascism.[59] However, with Gentile and with Fascism, the "problem of the party" existed by virtue of the fact that the Fascist "party", as such, arose organically rather than from a tract or pre-established socio-political doctrine. This complicated the matter for Gentile as it left no consensus to any way of thinking among Fascists, but ironically, this aspect was to Gentile's view of how a state or party doctrine should live out its existence: withnatural organic growth and dialectical opposition intact. The fact that Mussolini gave credence to Gentile's viewpoints via Gentile's authorship helped with an official consideration, even though the "problem of the party" continued to exist for Mussolini as well.
Gentile placed himself within the Hegelian tradition but also sought to distance himself from those views he considered erroneous. He criticised Hegel's dialectic (of Idea-Nature-Spirit), and instead proposed that everything is Spirit, with the dialectic residing in thepure act of thinking. Gentile believed Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making. To the neo-Hegelian Gentile, Marx had made the dialectic into an external object and therefore had abstracted it by making it part of a material process of historical development. The dialectic to Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking. It was, to Gentile, a concrete subject and notabstract object. This Gentile expounded on how humans think in forms wherein one side of a dual opposite could not be thought of without its complement.
"Upward" wouldn't be known without "downward" and "heat" couldn't be known without "cold", while each are opposites they are co-dependent for either one's realization: these were creations that existed as dialectic only in human thinking and couldn't be confirmed outside of which, and especially could not be said to exist in a condition external to human thought like independent matter and a world outside of personal subjectivity or as an empirical reality when not conceived in unity and from the standpoint of the human mind.
To Gentile, Marx's externalising of the dialectic was essentially a fetishistic mysticism. Though when viewed externally thus, it followed that Marx could then make claims to the effect of what state or condition the dialectic objectively existed in history,a posteriori of where any individual's opinion was while comporting oneself to the totalized whole of society. i.e. people themselves could, by such a view, be ideologically 'backwards' and left behind from the current state of the dialectic and not themselves be part of what is actively creating the dialectic as-it-is.
Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no 'positive' independently existing dialectical object. Rather, the dialectic was natural to the state, as it is. Meaning that the interests composing the state are composing the dialectic by their living organic process of holding oppositional views within that state, and unified therein. It is the mean condition of those interests as long as they exist. Even criminality is unified as a necessary dialectic to be subsumed into the state and a creation and natural outlet of the dialectic of the positive state, as ever it is.
This view (influenced by the Hegelian theory of the state) justified the corporative system, wherein the individualised and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personally incorporated into the state ("Stato etico"), each to be considered a bureaucratic branch of the state itself and given official leverage. Gentile, rather than believing the private to be swallowed synthetically within the public as Marx would have it in his objective dialectic, believed that public and private werea priori identified with each other in an active and subjective dialectic: one could not be subsumed fully into the other as they already are beforehand the same. In such a manner, each is the other after their own fashion and from their respective, relative, and reciprocal position. Yet both constitute the state itself, and neither are free from it; nothing ever being truly free from it, the state (as in Hegel) exists as an eternal condition and not an objective, abstract collection of atomistic values and facts of the particulars about what is positively governing the people at any given time.
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