Giovanni Gentile ( jen-TEE-lay; Italian: [dʒoˈvanni dʒenˈtiːle]; 29 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian pedagogue, philosopher, and politician. He was one of the primary founders of fascism.
Born in Castelvetrano, Gentile graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa. He, alongside Benedetto Croce, was a major exponent of Italian idealism in Italian philosophy, and also devised his own system of thought, which he called "actual idealism" or "actualism", which has been described as "the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition".
Described by himself and by Benito Mussolini as the "philosopher of fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian fascism, notably through writing the 1925 Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, and part of the 1932 "The Doctrine of Fascism" with Mussolini. As Minister for Public Education, he introduced in 1923 the so-called Gentile Reform of the Italian educational system, the first major piece of legislation passed by the Fascist government, which would last in some capacity until 1962. He also helped found the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia with Giovanni Treccani, and was its first editor.
Though his political influence waned as Mussolini sought the alliance of the Catholic Church in the late 1920s, which conflicted with Gentile's secularism, he remained a faithful Fascist, even after the 1943 armistice with the Allies, and followed Mussolini into the Italian Social Republic. He was assassinated in 1944 by partisans of the Italian resistance.
Contents
Biography
Early life and career
Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Italy. He was inspired by Risorgimento-era Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, "self-construction", but also strongly influenced and mentored 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 (Doctrine of Science), a 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. In religion he presented himself as a Catholic (of sorts), and emphasised actual idealism's Christian heritage; Antonio G. Pesce insists that «there is in fact no doubt that Gentile was a Catholic»; and Gentile once spoke of "his" atheism only in reference to the accusation of atheism leveled against him, although he maintained until the end that he was culturally Catholic. Gentile thought that God is immanent in the act of thinking, not a separate transcendent entity.
Gentile 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.
In 1898 he graduated in Letters and Philosophy with a dissertation titled Rosmini e Gioberti, that he realised under the supervision of Donato Jaja, a disciple of Bertrando Spaventa.
During his academic career, Gentile served in a number of positions, including:
Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo (27 March 1910);
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa (9 August 1914);
Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome (11 November 1917), and later as Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (1926);
Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1928–32), and later as its Director (1932–43); and
First World War
Gentile was largely uninvolved with politics prior to the outbreak of World War One; he saw himself as a conservative liberal in the vein of Cavour, but mostly concerned himself with writing on the matters of education. Like many Italians, however, the war marked the start of more active involvement in politics, and publicly declared himself for Italy's intervention in the war after the disastrous Battle of Caporetto in 1917, though was privately one from the outbreak of the war. He saw the war as the emergence of a new Italy, which had to fight and destroy the "easy-going, idle Italy", "known for its faint-hearted nature, its individualism, its poor sense of taste and its tendency to withdraw into private egoism"; it was a chance to complete the Risorgimento and uphold its ideals.
Despite his ardent support of the war, he remained staunch in his criticism of the extreme nationalists such as Enrico Corradini and the Italian Nationalist Association for their rejection of liberalism. By the end of the war in 1918, he was attacking much of the Italian political sphere: the Socialists and the Catholics of the future Popular Party for their opposition to the national state; the Vatican as a hostile independent power opposed to the existence of Italy; and the liberal trasformismo of Giovanni Giolitti and the Italian Parliament, marred by endless squabbling, and now an outdated relic in the face of the "new Italy" birthed by the experience of war.
Gentile was indignant at the rejection of Italy's claims, set out in the 1915 Treaty of London, at the Paris Peace Conference. Not only did it fail to respect the hard-fought gains of the "new Italy", but it encouraged fatalism, liberal back-biting, and the questioning of the ideals of intervention in the first place—that is, of the spiritual invigoration that Gentile saw as the most significant consequence of the war. As such, he would support the ultranationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1919 occupation of Fiume, which was an important precursor to Fascism. Nonetheless, he continued to believe in liberal democracy and praised the new Prime Minister, Francesco Saverio Nitti, for his commitment to national economic recovery. As the post-war period wore on, Gentile saw no sign of the spiritual revolution within Italian liberal society that he had hoped for, and became increasingly disillusioned; he disengaged with active politics in 1920 and would not return to it until Benito Mussolini's 1922 seizure of power in the March on Rome, by which point fascist doctrine was largely complete.
Involvement with Fascism
In 1922, on the recommendation of Benedetto Croce, who had refused the role himself, Gentile was named Minister for Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. The cabinet, though strongly right-wing, was broadly non-partisan; Gentile's inclusion, alongside several other notable non-fascists, was taken as a sign of reconciliation and the promised return to law-and-order. He officially joined the National Fascist Party in 1923.
In his capacity as Minister for Public Education, he instituted the 1923 Gentile Reform, which was the first major reform of the education system since the Unification of Italy and the Casati Law Despite lacking any substantial education policy prior to coming to power, it was the first significant piece of legislation of the Fascist regime; Mussolini described it as the "most Fascist reform".
Based on philosophically idealist and conservative elitist ideas, it was designed to help form the new elite of Fascist society and to reduce the number of intellectual graduates saturating the job market.
An additional purpose of the reform was to improve the regime's relationship with the Catholic Church. It made religious instruction mandatory in junior schools, gave equal distinction to private (notably Catholic) and state schools, and allowed both to sit the same qualification exams for entrance into higher education; these were important elements of the programme of the Catholic Popular party, and did much to shore up Catholic opinion of the Fascist regime—a long-standing problem for Italian governments due to the Roman Question—as part of a wider programme of concessions by Mussolini to the Vatican. However, it did not go far enough to completely please the Church. Complaints remained over the fact that religious teaching was neither given by priests nor extended beyond the junior schools.
Included in this reform was an attempt to limit the number of women teachers in schools, part of Italian Fascism's wider campaign against feminism, suggesting that: Women do not have, nor will they ever have, either the moral or mental vigor to teach in those schools which formed the ruling class of the country.
The reform also mandated that Italian was the only language to be used in public schools, severely impacting the autonomy of non-Italian speaking minorities—known as allogeni—particularly in the regions of Alto-Adige and the Julian March, recently annexed in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye following the First World War.
Assassination
On 30 March 1944, Gentile received death threats blaming him for the execution of the Martyrs of Campo di Marte by Republic of Salò troops and accusing him of promoting fascism. Only two weeks later, on 15 April 1944, Bruno Fanciullacci and Antonio Ignesti, both of whom belonged to the communist partisan organisation Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), approached Gentile in his parked car, hiding pistols behind a book. When Gentile lowered the car window to speak to them, he was immediately hit with several bullets to the chest and heart, killing him. Fanciullacci was killed several months later as he tried to escape capture.
Gentile's assassination divided the anti-fascist front. It was disapproved of by the Tuscan branch of the CLN with the sole exception of the Italian Communist Party, which approved the assassination and claimed responsibility for it.
Gentile was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.
Philosophy
Patrick Romanell, philosopher and translator of the work of Benedetto Croce, wrote that Gentile "holds the honor of having been the most rigorous neo-Hegelian in the entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy." 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 location of authority and loyalty outside of which individuality had no meaning (and which in turn helped justify the totalitarian dimension of fascism).
Gentile enjoyed fruitful intellectual relations with Croce from 1899—and particularly during their joint editorship of La Critica from 1903 to 1922—but broke philosophically and politically from Croce in the early 1920s over Gentile's embrace of fascism. (Croce assesses their philosophical disagreement in Una discussione tra filosofi amici in Conversazioni Critiche, II.)
Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order wherein opposites of all kinds were not to be considered as existing independently from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness' as broad interpretations were currently false as imposed by all former kinds of government, including capitalism and communism; and that only the reciprocal totalitarian state of corporatism, a fascist state, could defeat these problems which are made from reifying as an external reality that which is in fact, to Gentile, only a reality in thinking. Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Gentile postulated (after Hegel) the opposite, that the subject is concrete and the object a mere abstraction (or rather, that what was conventionally dubbed "subject" is in fact only conditional object, and that the true subject is the act of being or essence of the object).
Gentile was, because of his actualist system, a notable philosophical presence across Europe during his time. At its base, Gentile's brand of idealism asserted the primacy of the "pure act" of thinking. This act is foundational to all human experience and involves a process of "reflective awareness" (in Italian, "l'atto del pensiero, pensiero pensante") that is constitutive of the Absolute and revealed in education. Gentile's emphasis on seeing Mind as the Absolute signalled his "revival of the idealist doctrine of the autonomy of the mind." It also connected his philosophical work to his vocation as a teacher. In actual idealism, then, pedagogy is transcendental and provides the process by which the Absolute is revealed. His idea of a transcending truth above positivism garnered particular attention by emphasizing that all modes of sensation only take the form of ideas within one's mind; in other words, they are mental constructs. To Gentile, for example, even the correlation of the function and location of the physical brain with the functions of the physical body was merely a consistent creation of the mind, and not of the brain (itself a creation of the mind). Observations like this have led some commentators to view Gentile's philosophy as a kind of "absolute solipsism," expressing the idea "that only the spirit or mind is real".
Phases of his thought
A number of developments in Gentile's thought and career helped to define his philosophy, including:
the definition of Actual Idealism in his work Theory of the Pure Act (1903);
his support for the invasion of Libya (1911) and the entry of Italy into World War I (1915);
his dispute with Benedetto Croce over the historic inevitability of Fascism;
his role as minister of education (1922–24);
his belief that Fascism could be made subservient to his philosophical thought, along with his gathering of influence through the work of students like Armando Carlini (leader of the so-called "right Gentilians") and Ugo Spirito (who applied Gentile's philosophy to social problems and helped codify Fascist political theory); and
his work on the Enciclopedia Italiana (1925–43; first edition finished in 1936).
Gentile's definition of and vision for Fascism
Gentile considered Fascism the fulfilment of the Risorgimento ideals, particularly those represented by Giuseppe Mazzini and the Historical Right party.
Gentile sought to make his philosophy the basis for Fascism. However, with Gentile and with Fascism, the "problem of the party" existed by virtue of the fact that the Fascist "party", as such, arose organically rather than from a tract or pre-established socio-political doctrine. This complicated the matter for Gentile as it left no consensus to any way of thinking among Fascists, but ironically, this aspect was 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 gave credence to Gentile's viewpoints via Gentile's authorship helped with an official consideration, even though the "problem of the party" continued to exist for Mussolini as well.
Gentile placed himself within the Hegelian tradition but also sought to distance himself from those views he considered erroneous. He criticised Hegel's dialectic (of Idea-Nature-Spirit), and instead proposed that everything is Spirit, with the dialectic residing in the pure act of thinking. Gentile believed Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making. To the neo-Hegelian Gentile, Marx had made the dialectic into an external object and therefore had abstracted it by making it part of a material process of historical development. The dialectic to Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking. It was, to Gentile, a concrete subject and not abstract object. This Gentile expounded on how humans think in forms wherein one side of a dual opposite could not be thought of without its complement.
"Upward" wouldn't be known without "downward" and "heat" couldn't be known without "cold", while each are opposites they are co-dependent for either one's realization: these were creations that existed as dialectic only in human thinking and couldn't be confirmed outside of which, and especially could not be said to exist in a condition external to human thought like independent matter and a world outside of personal subjectivity or as an empirical reality when not conceived in unity and from the standpoint of the human mind.