Giovanni Gentile: Encyclopedia II - Giovanni Gentile - Life and Thought

Giovanni Gentile - Life and Thought

Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. Gentile was inspired by such Italian thinkers as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi or self-construction, but was just as strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought. Namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, or theory for a structure of knowledge which makes no assumptions. Nietzsche too, played an influence on Gentile, as can be seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista.

Gentile, described both by himself and Mussolini as 'the philosopher of Fascism', ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism for Benito Mussolini. It first appeared in 1932 in the Italian Encyclopedia (which was edited by Gentile). In it he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism, führerprinzip, abolition of the parliamentary system, and autarky. Gentile was minister of education and later a member of the Fascist Grand Council during the Fascist regime. He stayed loyal to Mussolini after the establishment of the Republic of Salò and accepted an appointment from the government. In 1944 he was killed by a group of anti-fascist partisans while returning from the Prefecture in Florence.

Gentile had believed so firmly in the philosophical concreteness of Fascism as having a dialectical intelligence surpassing intellectual scrutiny, that he presumed intellectual opposition could only reinforce and give credence to help the truth of his conception of Fascism as a superior and liberally thinking polity.

Gentile's philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding of ontology and epistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection of individualism, acceptance of collectivism, with the state as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality no meaning outside of the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism).

Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds weren't to be given sanction as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed by all former kinds of Government; capitalism, communism, and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of Corporative Syndicalism, a Fascist state, could defeat these problems made from reifing as an external that is in fact only a thinking reality.

Gentile was a notable philosophical theorist of his time throughout Europe, having developed his own system of Idealism called Actual Idealism or sometimes 'Actualism,' in which negativism was in itself considered a form of positivism by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's mind in any real sense. 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 sense possible, except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (i.e. being invented apart from the thinking making it) are presupposed.

Therefore Gentile proposed a form of what he called 'absolute Immanentism' 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 a Humanism that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was human; the self's human thinking, in order to mold others as it knew 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Life and Thought", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki