John Dunn

Once the philosophical leap is made from materialism to idealism, the vista of liberty opens up.

For the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, philosophical logic should be presuppostionless. He wrote, ‘life in all its fullness is neither art, nor religion, nor science. It is morality’. Morality is meant here in the context of man’s freedom of choice, for good or ill.

Self-realisation was the fundamental moral imperative for Gentile. He considered philosophy to be ‘continual vigilance and reflection over what we are, and what we make of ourselves… The dialectic of self-consciousness…is the root of philosophy’.

This philosophy counters the predominant cultural Marxism of our day that permeates politics on both the Left and Right. Roger Garaudy captured exactly the essence of the freedom made possible when he wrote, ‘the future is not a scenario written, which we only have to act out; it is a work which we have to create’.

John Dunn.