John Dunn

Actionism

Sunday, 15 June 2025 at 22:32

Giovanni Gentile

Actionism

Gentile conceptualised his response to Spinozist realism as the Theory of Mind as Pure Act, or Actionism, a philosophy without presuppositions that transcend the act of thinking. It proposed the internality of all the objects of experience (or the totality of the thinkable) in the activity of the thinking ego. Thus in Gentile’s Actionism we find the purest expression of the Promethean spirit.

We see our thought not as act done, but as act in the doing.

In no other way is a spiritual world conceivable. Whoever conceives it, ifhe has truly conceived it as spiritual, cannot set it up in opposition to his own activity in conceiving it.

If we would understand the nature of this subject, the unique and unifying transcendental I, in which the whole objectivity of spiritual beings is resolved, confronted by nothing which can assert independence, a subject therefore with no otherness opposed to it, - if we would understand the nature of this reality we must think of it not as a being or a state, but as a constructive process.

In the world of mind nothing is already done, nothing is because it is finished and complete; all is always doing.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Gentile Counters the Doctrine of Realism

Thursday, 12 June 2025 at 22:58

Giovanni Gentile

Gentile Counters the Doctrine of Realism

In the Spinozist conception, reality is nature, the universe, existing independently of human thought which only aspires to know it, without ever attempting to transform it into a better world of its own - the moral world. The will is degraded by this doctrine of realism to a mere device of reasoning, compelling human conduct to conform to the laws of nature. Its function is therefore negative rather than positive. It is destined to put out of man’s mind any foolish desire to oppose himself vainly to reality, which, being what it is, cannot be changed to please us. Ecologism and the green movement are the latest variants of Spinozist philosophical passivity. This is the enchainment of man, for which the Promethean myth provides the allegory. Spinozist realism holds that the objects of knowledge do not depend for their existence on the knowledge of them. It makes knowing not the activity of the subject but its passivity. In this lies the enslavement that Gentile sought to escape.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Actualism

Monday, 9 June 2025 at 22:35

Giovanni Gentile


Actualism

What horrified Gentile in Spinoza’s Ethics was the categorisation of humanistic opposition to reality as ‘foolish desire’, and the degradation of the will and compulsion to conform that follows from this. Nowhere did Gentile identify the socio-economic and political motivations underpinning Spinoza's philosophy, but it is certainly no coincidence that Gentile should have put his own philosophy, which he called Actualism, at the service of the Fascist cause. Antipathy to Spinozism aligned with the Mussolini regime’s opposition to the economic liberalism of the Western Allies, the heirs to Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Bridge from Coleridge to Gentile

Friday, 6 June 2025 at 22:31

Giovanni Gentile

Bridge from Coleridge to Gentile

If Coleridge warmed to the principles of active self-creation laid down by Vico, then it should not be surprising either that the Italian political philosopher Vico was an influence upon the Italian philosopher of action par excellence, Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). About Gentile’s response to Vico, William Smith wrote:

Vico, according to Gentile, taught that we can know an object when the object is neither found nor discovered by our thought as existing before we began to know.Vico must have seen, therefore, that knowing is resolving an object into one’s spiritual activity. Truth, then, involves a making, a creative activity. In this Vico anticipated Kant and Hegel.

With regard to the deity, Gentile aligned Vico with St. Paul and St. Augustine and their view on the presence of God in the world. Gentile states that in these men it is evident that ‘we have that immanence of the divine in the mind of man, which we see in the doctrine of providence in Vico’.

If a shared affinity to Vico offers a bridge from Coleridge to Gentile, then so too does a clear anti-Spinozism.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Affinity to Vico

Tuesday, 3 June 2025 at 22:03

Giambattista Vico

Affinity to Vico

When Coleridge first read the Autobiography and Scienza Nuovaby Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) his response was quick, hospitable and incisive. In a letter dated 16th may 1825, he wrote:

I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico and if I had (which thank God’s good grace I have not) the least drop of Author’s blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have exclaimed ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere’. (‘May they perish, who said first what we were going to say.’)

Coleridge was referring to Vico’s masterpiece La Scienza Nuova,which he read in Italian, using the edition published in Milan in 1816.Vico’s central principle was the idea that human nature is not ever the same: static and unalterable, with a central kernel. Rather, Vico’s motto was - ‘humanity is its own creation’. This central principle led him to a new type of aesthetics, not based on universal norms, but on the uniqueness of each individual culture or civilisation. To the traditional types of knowledge, a priori, deductive, a posteriori, empirical, the products of sense-perception and revelation, there had tobe added that of the reconstructive imagination. Even if Coleridge discovered Vico too late for him to be a defining influence upon his own work, he did feel an affinity to Vico’s emphasis upon the creative imagination and the notion of humanity being active in ‘its own creation’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

‘Knowledge causative of its own reality’

Saturday, 31 May 2025 at 22:10

‘Knowledge causative of its own reality’

Coleridge and the other Romantics found the distinguishing feature of what it means to be human in the creative imagination, which is the very thing lacking in Spinozism and in the modern era described by Weininger as ‘a time without originality’. In contradistinction to the prevailing Marxism of our times and the subhuman passivity to which it leads, Coleridge asserted that ‘the Will, the absolute Will, is that which is essentially causative of reality, essentially, and absolutely, that is, boundless from without and within’. He attacked the passive empiricism of Enlightenment thinking by asserting that an ‘Idea is not simply knowledge or perception as distinguished from the thing perceived’, a critique that might well be levelled at the fact collecting ‘expert’ of our own times. Rather, an idea is ‘a realising knowledge, a knowledge causative of its own reality’. And this is as far as Coleridge travelled in his rejection of Spinozist necessitarianism, still one step short of saying the Living God is in the Living Me - a self- defining concept upon which I will expand in my discussion of John’s Gospel later in this book.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Top rung of the Triple Icheit

Thursday, 29 May 2025 at 21:54

Top rung of the Triple Icheit

‘The whole enterprise of the human spirit issues from the imagination,’ according to Fichte. This was the central tenet of his Science of Knowledge and marked no less than the resurrection of the self, an overcoming of Spinozist hypostasis, an escape from a Dantean Hell. Coleridge, in developing Fichte’s insight further, was the most ambitious in asserting that the human mind imitates the divine mind in God-like acts of creation, an imitative repetition of its original counterpart. This is the domain of the Secondary Imagination, or the top rung of the Triple Icheit ladder, where the creative act is ‘essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.