Giovanni Gentile - Life and Thought

Life and Thought

Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, “self-construction”, but also was 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, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista. He was an atheist.

He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.

During his academic career Gentile was a Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo (March 27, 1910), Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa (August 9, 1914), Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome (November 11, 1917), professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome (1926), Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1928-1932), Director of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1932-1943) and Vice President of Bocconi University in Milan (1934 to 1944).

In 1923 he was named Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. In this capacity he instituted the “Riforma Gentile” — a reformation of the secondary school system that had a long-lasting influence upon Italian education. His philosophical works included The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916) and Logic as Theory of Knowledge (1917), with which he defined Actual Idealism, a unified metaphysical system reinforcing his sentiments that philosophy isolated from life, and life isolated from philosophy, are but two identical modes of backward cultural bankruptcy. For Gentile, that theory indicated how philosophy could directly influence, mould, and penetrate life: philosophy could govern life.

His philosophical system viewed thought as all-embracing: no-one could actually leave his or her sphere of thought, nor exceed his or her thought. Reality was unthinkable, except in relation to the activity by means of which it becomes thinkable, positing that as a unity — held in the active subject and the discrete abstract phenomena that reality comprehends — wherein each phenomenon, when truly realised, was centered within that unity; therefore, it was innately spiritual, transcendent, and immanent, to all possible things in contact with the unity. Gentile used that philosophic frame to systematize every item of interest that now was subject to the rule of absolute self-identification — thus rendering as correct every consequence of the hypothesis. The resultant philosophy can be interpreted as an idealist foundation for Legal Naturalism.

Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as 'the philosopher of Fascism'; moreover, he was the ghostwriter of the essay A Doctrine of Fascism (1932), by Benito Mussolini. It was first published in 1932, in the Italian Encyclopedia, (directed by Gentile, editor in Chief Antonino Pagliaro, edited by Giovanni Treccani), wherein he described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism, Philosopher Kings, the abolition of the parliamentary system, and autarky. He also wrote the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, signed by many writers and intellectuals, including Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.

Gentile became a member of the Fascist Grand Council of the régime, and remained loyal to Mussolini even after the fall of the Fascist government in 1943. He supported Mussolini in the establishment of the "Republic of Salò", a puppet state of Nazi Germany, despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws, and he accepted an appointment in the government. Gentile was last president of Royal Academy of Italy (1943-1944).

In 1944 a group of anti-fascist partisans, led by Bruno Fanciullacci, killed ‘the philosopher of Fascism’ as he returned from the Prefecture in Florence, where he had argued for the release of anti-fascist intellectuals.

Giovanni Gentile so firmly believed that the philosophic concreteness of Fascism possessed a dialectical intelligence that surpassed intellectual scrutiny, that he presumed that intellectual opposition would only reinforce, and thus give credence to, the truth of the superiority of Fascism as a superior form of polity.