Giovanni Gentile

4 Key excerpts on "Giovanni Gentile"

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  Giovanni Gentile

  Philosopher of Fascism

  • A. James Gregor(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile It was in that context that Gentile began his intellectual work—and the intensity and drama of that period does much to explain his passion and his intransigence. From the very first, Gentile’s work manifested an ardent evangelical quality. It was animated by a clear commitment to the defeat of positivism as a pernicious enemy, the defense of Italy’s millennial past, and an unqualified devotion to its future. For at least those reasons, the work of Gentile seems singularly alien to the thought of most Anglo-Americans. We share little of the psychology of Italy at the turn of the twentieth century—and as a consequence, fail to appreciate what might make Gentilean idealism so attractive to many Italians at that time. Moreover, we tend to be totally unfamiliar with the language—Hegelian and idealist—through which Gentile expressed his technical philosophy. After the eclipse of the English idealists—such as J. H. Stirling, T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley 1 —the more dynamic trends of Anglo-American thought have occupied themselves with those aspects of philosophy that serve, largely, as ancillaries to empirical science: mathematical logic, theories of probability, semiotics, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of language

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  The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader

  • Michael Lewis, David Rose, Michael Lewis, David Rose(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Intuition gives us the world, the phenomenal: conceptual knowledge gives us the noumenal, the Spirit. HAPTER C 8 Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Giovanni Gentile’s academic and public writings were nearly always driven by the energy of a commitment to the idea that philosophy ought to influence and determine the cultural life of individuals and the nation. He grossly misjudged the fascist movement and became its official philosopher, ghost-writing Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism . Prior to his intervention, fascism had no doctrinal theory and Gentile was guilty of giving a brutal and intolerant nationalism a veneer of not just respectability but rationality and, like Mussolini’s architectural follies, sought the rebirth of Italian cultural ascendency through a robust and tightly controlled social existence, grounding the philosophical aspects of fascism in the collectivist, corporatist and conservative elements of Hegel’s political philosophy. Gentile held positions at Palermo, Pisa and Rome and was the Minister of Public Education for two years from 1922 under the fascist government, driving through radical educational reforms against what he saw as cronyism in the Italian state. He was executed in Florence in 1944 by the partisans due to the loyalty he showed to the puppet state of the Republic of Sal ò after the German occupation of part of Italy. However, concentrating solely on his ideas, there was no more motivating philosophical ground for Gentile’s support of fascism than for his contemporary and one-time friend Benedetto Croce’s rejection of it. In both cases, the support or rejection makes sense only when welded to personal dispositions, convictions and interests. Gentile’s intellectual odyssey begins with Marx’s critique of Hegel, which reveals the error of detaching ideas from reality, yet also with a disagreement as to Marx’s own resolution. According to Gentile, both thinkers fail to resolve the dialectic between ideas and reality.

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  Modern Italian Social Theory

  Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present

  • Richard Bellamy(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  6

  GIOVANNI GENTILE

  Giovanni Gentile was born at Castelvetrano in Sicily on 30 May 1875, and assassinated by communist partisans on 15 April 1944. Best known as the philosopher of fascism, he was as important as Croce, with whom he collaborated until 1924, in reviving the idealist tradition in Italy. In some respects his influence was greater than Croce’s, since his university position gave him more opportunities for building up an academic school. This was particularly true after the fascist seizure of power when, as Minister of Education in Mussolini’s first government, he was able to apply his ideas in a comprehensive reform of the educational system, and ultimately became the official cultural spokesman of the regime. Above all, the principle doctrine of his social philosophy – the unity of thought and action – forced upon him the moral duty, as he saw it, of putting his ideas into practice. This chapter will therefore investigate the extent to which ‘actual idealism’ necessarily leads to fascism.

  THE REFORM OF THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC

  Gentile’s philosophy was more firmly rooted in the native idealist culture than Croce’s. His philosophical works are written at a high level of abstraction and assume a detailed knowledge of his sources. His thought is therefore best elucidated in the context of the tradition of post-Kantian idealism in Italy which he aimed to develop.

  Actualism was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation, thereby abolishing the distinction between thought and practice. He claimed that his main thesis could already be found in his doctoral dissertation of 1897 on the Italian neo-Kantians, Rosmini and Gioberti, where ‘to explain the value of Rosmini’s philosophy and hence of Kant’s [I maintain] that a profound difference exists between the category (which is the act of thought [l’atto del pensiero]), and the concept (which is the fact thought about [il pensato]). From then on I have considered thought as real only in its actuality, as a priori’.1 Kant rejected the empiricist epistemology which regarded human knowledge as the product of sense impressions of external objects. He replaced this model with the notion of an a priori synthesis, whereby the concepts by which we interpreted reality constituted the objects of experience. Thus the causal connection of events was not supplied by experience but by the Understanding, as a necessary condition of our awareness of causality. However Gentile, following Hegel, did not believe Kant was radical enough in his criticism of ‘realism’. Having rejected the empiricist idea that objects were given in experience, Kant reintroduced it in the guise of a given in the Understanding – his fixed set of categories for interpreting the world. By positing a fixed noumenal world as the transcendental ground of phenomenal experience, Kant ended up denying the truly creative faculty of the Understanding.2

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  Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution

  • J. Martin(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  As for others of his gen- eration, Salvemini's empirical critique cut through the verbiage of normal political life and helped Gobetti position himself outside the strictures of party affiliation. Philosophical idealism, on the other hand, underscored an urgent need for "spiritual" transformation in Italy, one led by "mili- tant" intellectuals conscious of their civil function. While Gobetti's politi- cal affiliations, at this time, were still fluid, it is this anticipation of renewal through political critique and philosophical idealism that later informed his revolutionary liberalism. 32 PIERO GOBEnI AND TH E POLITICS OF LIBERAL REVO LUTIO N For one biographer, the enduring significance of Gobetti's early period lies in its instigation of a new politics of the intellectual: one that used a public platform to engage polit ical issues without succumbing to doc- trinaire party politics.' Rather than a detached observer of cultural life, separated from politics, the intellectual, in Gobetti's example , was charged with revitalizing the nation by bringing together culture and politics, mix- ing theoretical reflection with day-to-day issues of state. This image of the intellectual's "mission;' which he shared with a number of other thinkers, was undoubtedly borne of the great disruption brought by the war, which had collapsed the notional separation of public and private . As Italian lib- eralism was pulled apart under the centrifugal forces of an ever-deepening social and political crisis, Gobetti's early years afforded him an opportunity to establish an audience of radical intellectuals and liberals attentive to the possibilities for remaking liberal Italy. A Turinese Education Piero Gobetti was born on June 19, 1901, and raised in the subalpine city of Turin, the united Italian kingdom's first capital and the traditional seat of its the Savoyard royalty.

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