A FASCIST AND A HUMANIST

[The title is a jocular take on the familiar phrase “An officer and a gentleman.”

For much more on Giovanni Gentile see my entry Totalitarismo E La Dottrina Del Fascismo in the Collective section. I have numerous references to Gentile in other entries, for which I advise the reader to use the Find function. In the future, my entries on the person of Gentile and the phenomenon of Italian fascism are to be properly organized and thematically separated to a far greater extent than they are now, but obviously, this important task does not belong to my immediate priorities.]

Giovanni Gentile, admittedly, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, but at the same time the chief ideologue of Italian fascism… An incredible paradox!

Is this an irreconcilable contradiction or a natural connection in the mind of one man? The latter must obviously be the case, but an admission of this fact complicates the world’s rejection of the political system of fascism, making the fascist phenomenon far more complex than its mandatorily cartoonish depiction. My Webster’s Biographical Dictionary ‘solves’ this terribly politically incorrect problem by openly ignoring the fascist side of Gentile in the following biographical entry quoted here by me in toto.---

“Gentile, Giovanni. 1875-1944. Italian philosopher; professor, Naples (1898-1906), Palermo (1906-1914), Pisa (1914-1917), Rome (1917-44). Founded Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana (1920). Minister of public instruction (1922-1924); reformed Italian educational system; president, Supreme Council of Education (1926-28).”

It is to Webster’s credit not to besmirch Gentile’s legacy by his direct association with Fascism, and, not so obviously, it’s not Webster’s place to get bogged down in highly complicated discussions, although its glaring omission of the details of the man’s lifelong professional activity altogether can in no way be counted among the strongest points of Webster’s Gentile entry.

This is my special entry on the terribly intriguing Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), who was unquestionably an outstanding bona fide thinker, but politically had the vilest misfortune of living when he lived and volens-nolens being one of the most conspicuous champions of the losing political cause of Italian fascism, which to me of course is a source of great fascination. Unlike Santayana, who admired it, at least for the most part, but did not champion it philosophically, Gentile proudly described himself as “the philosopher of fascism,” and he co-wrote with Mussolini the 1932 La Dottrina del Fascismo (or perhaps wrote it in toto, but both names appear as its authors, Gentile’s name coming first, a tribute to a certain “modesty” exhibited here by Il Duce), the definitive formulation of the Fascist doctrine, as Gentile saw it. Ironically, he believed so strongly in the philosophical superiority of the Fascist idea that he welcomed open intellectual opposition, which, he thought, could only highlight and validate the truth of his conception of Fascism as a superior form of social organization.

It is very unfortunate that his writings on Fascism are hard to come by. I am convinced that a great deal of absolutely fascinating stuff could be gleaned from them, not for the purpose of resurrecting that doctrine, of course, but in order to understand its immanent attractiveness to the masses, which will no doubt keep reappearing on the world stage in numerous and varying, but all organically connected, reincarnations. It is one of those “eternal recurrences,” which better be not swept under the rug, lest we lose the track of human history.

It was an amazing and regrettably sorely uninvestigated combination of two seemingly incompatible traits in the person of Gentile: he was a fascist and a humanist! This is as far as I can go at this time in my depiction of Gentile’s fascism, except to remind the reader the previously mentioned fact that he was the originator of the little-understood term totalitarianism (which he obviously used in the positive sense), and to state a few details of his life, such as that he was minister of education and later a member of the Fascist Grand Council during the Fascist regime. Staying loyal to Mussolini through thick and thin, he was murdered, in 1944, by a group of anti-fascist partisans, while returning from the Prefecture in Florence, where ironically he had been arguing for the prompt release of a group of recently arrested anti-fascist intellectuals. As an indispensable part of his life’s résumé, becoming Italy’s Minister of Public Education in 1923, Gentile introduced a progressive and radical educational reform of the secondary school system, known as Riforma Gentile. It had a profound effect on Italian education, which would incredibly survive the downfall of Fascism and live on through postwar time as an example to be emulated.

Every philosopher, even the most uniquely original, is necessarily influenced by other thinkers, both directly and indirectly. Turning now to Gentile’s general philosophical interests, his philosophy was influenced by a wide variety of earlier philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics, Protagoras, Plato, Vico, and Hegel to Marx and Nietzsche. The latter’s Übermensch finds his realization in Gentile’s Uomo Fascista. Let us not judge him too harshly, though, on the strength of this title alone. His meaning of the term and ours are politically worlds apart, without any prospect of philosophical reconciliation.

Gentile is known as the originator of what he himself called Actual Idealism, a form of idealism which contrasts the Transcendental Idealism of Kant and the Absolute Idealism of Hegel. The following sequence has been taken from the Wikipedia, as there is no need, except as an exercise in vanity, to try to tell this thing in my own words.---

Actual Idealism holds that it is the act of thinking as perception, not creative thought as imagination, which defines reality. Therefore one idea or another can only be a formulation of particulars within the bounds of a known totality that one idea is not on any side of those particulars. Totality constituting the whole reality, is negated in this idea by itself. Integration of totality against idea in appealing to oneself is the sole fruitful means of idea, which poses no favoritism to the developed ideas giving a knowing precedence to the world it has created itself into. Anything less is a presupposition and therefore innately unreal. This totality is the act of thinking, not thoughts so regarded by thinking.

While Realists agree that the world known to them is the only one they possibly know “as a static concept,” they continue to regard something real about the concept having nothing to do with their thinking. Actual Idealists disregard the static concept as totally false in regard to the world, where the only real for them is in “the act of thinking” within being.

The stance of Realism claims that repeatability of experience gives proof of a basis which transcends and outruns our percepts, refuting Idealism. Yet it doesn’t consider that the process of thinking as creation and the thought about thinking as abstraction interchange depending on the quality of our act. It is the process of thinking that creates thought, which may not recur, but what occurs as thinking of it, is what cannot be outrun as a conceptualization because it is the very immanent process of it, which is what definitely is. Not as thoughts perceived, but as perceptive thinking prior to being construed outside its totality as a thought, not made an abstraction, that cannot exist or be supposed to exist in any form outside one’s thinking. Only one’s thought reached from, and thus put outside of thinking can be surpassed; but only by thinking, not by an abstract external.

Actual Idealism therefore rejects the Hegelian Absolute, as being a presupposition unprovable to the mind, unless considered to be synonymous with what is known, or the totality of the act of thinking. Which therein would put the dialectical processes making self & not self a consideration proving external existence real, in so far as it is in reality part of the self’s own thinking. Since the self regarded alone is always a concept and can’t be given reality as such. Neither does Actual Idealism admit archetypal concepts in that possible conception of them in relation to all else gives them no reality. Gentile made a pivotal distinction to factors concerning Idealism’s own criteria for reality which have stood since Berkeley’s adage Esse est percipi, by distinguishing between pensiero pensante, the act of thinking, and the static thought pensiero pensato.

Gentile posited then, that knowledge as thought fixed against a fuller range of thinking limits thinking’s every proposition. If truth is what surpasses the conditions of every proposition, taking a known postulate as truth removes its criteria from having that capability in thinking. Objectifying actuality. Truth then cannot be known by thought, since knowledge held as thought is privative toward thinking as decided by what is thought. Only thinking as it penetrates, not given in to what categories of thought orient it, can be truth, so long as it does not resort to thought in doing so which would objectify it. Such thinking is truth because it, therefore, defines reality as by that thinking, rather than excluding truth from the possibility of thinking, because of its relation to yielding thoughts. Only because thinking’s results, namely, thoughts, do not pertain to what is arising from its act, the truth, does thinking itself become questioned as a proper conductor of truth. That however does not detract from the nature of truths being defined within the act as the concrete. Thinking, being the condition in which truths are measured, in fact affirms thinking’s own condition as truth, and when coupled with the idea that it generates thoughts which negate it, must the concrete be identified with thinking rather than simply being denied to thought seen as abstract and having that together assumed with thinking as denied also. For thinking cannot therefore be solely a producer of thoughts alone to Gentile, as is the position taken by materialists, because thoughts are to him what negate it, but must also be what produces the stable environment wherein being happens. Which, then, is the direct result of oneself, as the further quality, in which reality is not negated, as it is by thoughts to themselves.

Therefore this postulate maintains that thinking is an active process, and the static conception of a thought is its dialectical opposite. Where thinking is the vitality of psychological being, a thought is opposed to that vitality and therefore would be opposed to that immanent quality where alone existence takes on its reality to the Actual Idealist. No sense or imagining of something beyond or external to the act of thinking in itself for the thinker can be real, and, therefore, cannot be said to exist, even if, to continue the act of thinking it must be said that it does exist, as a creation of the act of thinking, if even then it remains unreal. Which, in considering it the measure of its existence, is realized for then it is exposed to the act of thinking, subject to reality; from an a priori beginning to a non-empirical conclusion without presupposition. (Wikipedia.)

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 and acceptance of collectivism, with the state as the ultimate seat of authority, and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality with no meaning outside of the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism). Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds were not 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. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see conditional subject as abstract and object as concrete, Gentile postulated quite the opposite, namely, that subject was the concrete and objectification was the abstraction (or rather; that what was conventionally dubbed ‘subject’ was in fact only conditional object and that true subject was the act of being or essence above any object).

Gentile was a notable philosophical theorist of his time throughout Europe, having developed his system of Actual Idealism, sometimes called Actualism. It was especially in which his ideas put subject to the position of a transcending truth above positivism that garnered attention; by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's mind in any real sense; to Gentile even the analogy between the function and location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body were a consistent creation of the mind (and not brain; which was a creation of the mind and not the other way around). An example of Actual Idealism in Theology is the idea that even though man may have invented the concept of God, it does not make God any less real in any sense possible in so far as it is not presupposed to exist as an abstraction, and except in case qualities about what existence actually entails (that is, being invented apart from the thinking making it) are presupposed.

Gentile took the stand against psychology and psycho-analysis that one cannot abstract (that is, make object out of) the source, which creates its own surrounding reality, as one does by one’s own philosophy, and that any empirical observations of behavioral anthropology appear true because empiricism adheres to its own laws, being a closed system, it is true within its own considered vacuum. His theory may be viewed as an extreme form of Occam’s Razor, even though it can appear to common sense to defy Occam’s Razor outright by the complex thinking involved to relate with his theory. But Gentile deduced that common sense in considering material reality was, to him, unphilosophical, because it was not self-critical of its sensory presuppositions. To him, making a thought category of his theory itself defied it by turning it into object, as any such idea of the philosophy that was not kept in subject or truly “actual” could not be Actual Idealism.

And finally, back again to Gentile’s definition of and vision for Fascism. He sought to make his philosophy become the basis of Fascism in much the same manner that Marx had developed his philosophy as the basis of Communism. However, with Gentile and Fascism the problem of the party existed by the fact that Fascist party came to be organically, rather than from a tract, or pre-made doctrine of thought. This complicated the matter for Gentile, as it left no consensus for any way of thinking among Fascists, but ironically, this aspect was close to Gentile’s view of how a state or party doctrine should live out its existence with natural organic growth and dialectical opposition intact. The fact that Mussolini chose to give credence to Gentile’s view points, via Gentile’s authorship, helped with an official consideration, even though the problem of the party continued to exist for Mussolini himself as well.

Gentile placed himself in the Marxist tradition in many respects but he found Marx’s view of the dialectic to be the basic flaw of his application to system-making. To Gentile, Marx turned the dialectic into an external object, thus abstracting it, by making it part of some process that theoretically exists, of outward matter and material. Dialectic to him could only be something of human precepts, something which is an active part of human thinking, a concrete subject and not an abstract object. Externalizing dialectic, Karl Marx was essentially engaging in 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 individuals 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 dialectic as such. Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no “positive” independently existing dialectical object. Rather, the dialectic was natural to the state as such. Meaning that the interests composing the state are composing dialectic by their living organic process of holding oppositional views within that state, and unified therein. It being the mean condition of those interests 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 is justifying the corporative system, wherein the individualized and particular interests of all divergent groups were to be personably incorporated into the State, each to be considered a bureaucratic branch of the State itself, given official leverage. Gentile, rather than believing the private to be swallowed synthetically within the public (as Marx had it in his objective dialectic), believed that public and private were a 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, positions. Yet both constitute the state itself and neither are free from it, nothing ever being truly free from it, the state existing 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.