John Dunn

A tale told by a thinker signifying everything

Monday, 23 June 2025 at 22:18

Prometheus by Heinrich Fueger, 1917

A tale told by a thinker signifying everything

Gentile’s point is that knowledge is not about reality but is reality. The world about us becomes ours by knowing it, which means actively creating it. Nosce Te Ipsum (Know Thyself) and you will know the world. Nothing, in short, transcends thinking. Thinking is absolute immanence. The self of Gentile’s actual idealism is essentially a thinker who wills by transforming the nature of things, the realm of actuality, existence, according to his needs. This type of thinker is a Prometheus, not a Spinoza. The essence of the self is the will to think. The I is strictly speaking not I, but makes itself, or becomes I, constantly defending itself against the seemingly real, whereas ‘reality is a tale told by a thinker signifying everything’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Such an empowerment

Wednesday, 18 June 2025 at 21:39

Giovanni Gentile

Such an empowerment

Is this the answer to the question ‘who am I?’ Could an answer so inflated as ‘my mind the creator of the universe’ lead anywhere? It was certainly Gentile’s answer. Never was such an empowerment considered. In taking up his crown and mitre, even Dante did not have such universalising vision as this. Reality is not particularised by the particularised ego, argued Gentile, reality is universalised by the universalising ego. Do away with all presuppositions, because the external character of a presupposition limits the very act of thinking or experience. ‘The measure of pure experience is not outside of it, but inside of it.’

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Reality

Tuesday, 17 June 2025 at 22:54

Reality

In short, actuality constitutes reality. Reality is the act of present thinking. All history, all future, exist in the act of present thinking.There is no real future and no real past, but only the present thinking of the future and past. Mind is neither in space nor in time but space and time are in it. The actual is the eternal present. Mind is the creator of the universe.

From Child of Encounter

© 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.