IDEALISM (ITALIAN) AND AFTER

Italian idealism and afterGentile, Croce and othersGiacomo RinaldiINTRODUCTIONThe history of twentieth-century Italian philosophy is strongly influenced both by thepeculiar character of its evolution in the preceding century and by widespread tendenciesof contemporary continental (especially German) thought. In nineteenth-century Italianphilosophy we can distinguish four main trends: (1) St Augustine’s and Aquinas’straditional dualistic metaphysics, which was renewed with some originality by the priestAntonio Rosmini Serbati (1797–1855), and was regarded by the Roman Catholic churchas its ‘official’ philosophical doctrine; (2) methodological empiricism, which wasdeveloped since the Renaissance especially by the founder of modern mathematicalphysics, Galileo Galilei, and which found its most prominent exponent in the positivistthinker Roberto Ardigò (1828–1920); (3) the speculative German tradition of Kantian-Hegelian idealism, according to its interpretation as a metafisica della mente, i.e. as aphilosophy of pure self-consciousness, outlined by the greatest nineteenth-century Italianthinker, Bertrando Spaventa (1817–83); and finally (4) Marx’s and Engels’s historicalmaterialism, which was spread and fostered especially by Antonio Labriola (1843–1904),who worked out a ‘humanistic’ (anti-naturalistic) interpretation of it.The influence of ‘classical German philosophy’ from Kant to Marx on twentiethcenturyItalian thought thus turns out to be strictly determined and ‘mediated’ by thepeculiar character of its interpretation and appropriation in the preceding century. Butother trends of German thought too are studied, interpreted and further developed bycontemporary Italian philosophers, thus exerting a direct, ‘immediate’ influence on them:e.g., the German tradition of ‘speculative mysticism’ (one might recall the philosophiesof the later Fichte and the later Schelling, as well as Gadamer’s ‘hermeneutics’), the‘philosophy of immanence’ (Schuppe and Schubert-Soldern), the ‘empiriocriticism’ ofMach and Avenarius; Husserl’s ‘phenomenology’ and Heidegger’s ‘existentialism’, etc.The peculiar political-cultural context in which the above-mentioned trends ofcontemporary Italian thought arise and spread can be sketched as follows.Thephilosophy of German idealism, and especially its Hegelian version, owing both to itsorigin in Protestant theology and religiosity and to its insistence on the state’s ‘ethical’essence as the supreme moral law of the individual’s practical activity, met the spiritualexigencies of those ‘liberal-national’ movements of the Italian Risorgimento which aimedat the foundation of a unitary state, and which saw their major adversary in the Catholicchurch’s temporal power.1 Augustine’s and Aquinas’s dualistic metaphysics, on thecontrary, prevailed in the most conservative classes and political trends in Italian society,and can be safely regarded, as it were, as the Roman Catholic church’s secular arm in itsintellectual and moral life. At the extreme opposite of the social-political array, Marx’shistorical materialism seemed able to offer an ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ foundation to thepolitical aspirations of those who dreamt of radically transforming Italian society’straditional order, be it the more archaic one sanctioned by the Roman Catholic church orthe more recent one of the national unitary state. Finally, positivistic empiricism became,as it were, the ‘official’ ideology of the rising Italian industrial bourgeoisie, concentratedespecially in the country’s northern regions.One can easily distinguish three fundamental evolutionary phases in twentieth-centuryItalian philosophy. In the first (c. 1900–45) we witness an indisputable prevalence of theidealistic trends, among them especially Giovanni Gentile’s thought. This is despite theoften exaggerated cultural influence of his ‘actual idealism’, which from its first ‘official’statement (1911) was strongly opposed by other no less famous representatives of Italianidealism such as Pietro Martinetti, Benedetto Croce and Pantaleo Carabellese. In thesecond phase (c. 1945–80), a widespread violent reaction against idealistic philosophy ingeneral, and ‘actual idealism’ in particular, occurred. Antonio Banfi, Nicola Abbagnano,etc. set against it not only the materialistic conception of history, but also later tendenciesof German thought such as, e.g., Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’sexistentialism. The distinction between the first and the second phase, however, must beunderstood not simply as a rigid separation, but as indicating a prevalence of theidealistic orientation in the first half of the twentieth century and of the anti-idealistic onein the second. In effect, the influence of nineteenth-century positivism does not disappearin the age dominatedby Croce’s and Gentile’s thought (it suffices to think, in this regard,of the writings of sociologists such as Vilfredo Pareto (1868–1923), of economists suchas Luigi Einaudi (1874–1961), and of methodologists of science such as Antonio Aliotta(1881–1964). Furthermore, many of the most prominent exponents of the reaction againstidealism in the second half of the century (e.g., Antonio Gramsci, Abbagnano and Banfi)had already worked out their fundamental conceptions before 1945. On the other hand,although in weakened and often speculatively unfruitful forms, the philosophicaltraditions of Gentile’s ‘actual idealism’ and of Croce’s ‘absolute historicism’ havesurvived up to today.2 In the 1980s, the final phase, something like a widespread ‘declineof ideology’ (‘tramonto dell’ideologia’) has, as Lucio Colletti says, taken place. The mostremarkable consequence of it is likely to be the perhaps definitive dissolution of thecultural influence of the materialistic conception of history, which in the second half ofthe century has often represented one of the most powerful and unrelenting adversaries ofany idealistic speculation. Although, then, the current situation of the ‘spirit’ of Italianculture is undoubtedly pervaded with a general feeling of bewilderment and creativeimpotence, yet it might also disclose new horizons and real possibilities for a criticalresumption and further original development of the most glorious and speculativelyfruitful trend in Italian thought—i.e., the Kantian-Hegelian tradition.‘ACTUAL IDEALISM’: GIOVANNI GENTILEGiovanni Gentile (1875–1944), who was rightly defined by Michele Federico Sciacca as‘the greatest Italian philosopher in our century’,3 was the author of numerousphilosophical and historiographical works which are to be counted among themasterpieces of Italian thought in any age and have left an indelible trace also on thedevelopment of contemporary European philosophy. Here I can confine myself tomentioning the most relevant ones: La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (The Reform ofHegelian Dialectic) (1913 [10.32]), Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica (AnOutline of Pedagogy as a Philosophical Science), two volumes (1913–14 [10.33]), Teoriagenerate dello spirito come atto puro (General Theory of Mind as Pure Act) (1916[10.35]), I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto (The Foundations of the Philosophy ofLaw) (1916 [10.34]), Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (A System of Logic as aTheory of Knowledge), two volumes (1917–22 [10.36]), Le origini della filosofiacontemporanea in Italia (The Origins of Contemporary Philosophy in Italy), threevolumes (1917–23 [10.37]), Discorsi di religions (Speeches on Religion) (1920 [10.38]),La filosofia dell’arte (The Philosophy of Art) (1931 [10.42]), Introduzione alla filo-sofia(An Introduction to Philosophy) (1933 [10.43]), and finally his posthumously publishedbook Genesi e struttura della società (Genesis and Structure of Society) (1946 [10.44]).Gentile’s works organically merge a vigorous theoretical development of his ownoriginal philosophical doctrine, ‘actual idealism’ (or ‘actualism’) with an immense,philologically very accurate, historiographical erudition, focusing especially upon thehistory of Italian philosophy and culture.The doctrine of ‘actual idealism’ can be safely regarded as an attempt to press to itsextreme consequences Spaventa’s interpretation of Hegelian philosophy as a metaphysicsof pure self-consciousness. Philosophy is the search for truth—not for this or thatparticular ‘abstract’ truth, but for the unique ‘absolute’ truth (and reality). And such atruth cannot possibly ‘transcend’ thought’s self-conscious act which aspires to itspossession. For in such a case not only could the latter never be ‘certain’ of any truthwhatsoever, but as essentially ‘other’ than (absolute) truth it could not but turn into amere contingent phenomenon. This, however, is clearly disproved by the fact that, asDescartes had already pointed out, one can deny the ‘evidence’ of self-conscious thoughtonly by virtue of a further, more original act of thinking. Gentile can therefore assert:‘cogito ergo sum; sum substantia cogitans; quatenus substantia in me sum et per meconcipior; hoc est mei conceptus non indiget conceptum alterius rei, a quo formaridebeat’ (‘I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking substance. As a substance I am in myselfand can be thought of only through myself—i.e., the concept of myself need not anyconcept of another thing in order to be thought of’).4 Yet according to Gentile, unlikeDescartes, not only is consciousness actual but the whole of reality turns intoconsciousness. For any possible objectivity, in the final analysis, turns out to beabsolutely enclosed in it, as its own immanent content, or rather ‘opposite’. Since the actof consciousness is one and ‘unmultiplicable’ (immoltiplicabile),5 the object’s essence,then, will be radically manifold. On the other hand, as the object is but a negative contentof knowing, that of which consciousness can be actually aware is only itself. As Hegelhad already maintained, the ‘truth’ of consciousness is therefore self-consciousness. ‘TheEgo’s act is consciousness as self-consciousness; the Ego’s object is the Ego itself. Anyconscious process is an act of self-consciousness.’6 In such an act, then, subject andobject coincide. But their identity is never ‘immediate’. For self-consciousness is everytruth only as the necessary consciousness of the error that essentially inheres to any‘immediate’ (i.e. sensuous, manifold, natural, etc.) being as such. As a consequence, its‘being’ can become actual only as the negation of a ‘not-being’ originally immanent toit—and thus is a dialectical unity of opposites. Now, as Hegel himself had shown by‘deducing’ Becoming from the opposite ‘abstractness’ of Being and Nothing, such aunity can be consistently conceived only as ‘movement’ or ‘process’: ‘The subject thatresolves the object into itself, at least when this object is a spiritual reality, is neither abeing nor a state of being: it is nothing immediate, as we said, but a constructingprocess—a process constructing the object as a process constructing the very subject.’7One of the deepest and most fascinating aspects of ‘actual idealism’ is certainlyGentile’s insightful distinction between his ‘transcendental’ concept of the self-consciousEgo and the ‘empirical Ego’ (the sensuous-finite individual), and consequently betweenthe former’s peculiar processuality and the form of ‘time’. In fact, both the empiricalEgos and time (which to Gentile, unlike Kant, is, like ‘space’, the essential form ofnature, not of consciousness) imply a plurality of ‘facts’, or ‘points’, which exclude eachother, either in the simultaneity of spatial existence or in the succession of temporalbecoming. The transcendental Ego, on the contrary, as necessarily existing (cogito ergosum), is of necessity universal, and thus unique. The mutual transcendence (exclusion) ofthe empirical Egos as well as of the moments of sensuous time (past, present and future),therefore, is in the final analysis negated (in the Hegelian sense of ‘negation’, i.e. asAufhebung) in the timeless, ‘eternal’ process of the transcendental Ego—of the pensieropensante. ‘Thought as actual, or as the universal Ego, contains, and therefore overcomesnot only the spatiality of pure nature, but also the temporality of pure natural becoming.Thought is beyond time, is eternal.’8 ‘And therefore the moment [istante], theof thought, is not a moment among the moments, is not in time; it has no‘before’, and no ‘after’; it is eternal.’9Gentile deduces with admirable logical cogency the overall articulation of spirit’swhole life from his concept of human self-consciousness as ‘mediate’, dynamic unity ofsubject and object. If their unity cannot in principle be ‘immediate’, this means that theyare immediately different, and even opposite. Pure (‘abstract’) subject, pure (‘abstract’)object, and their (‘concrete’) mediation (identity of subject and object)—these are thethree fundamental ‘phases’ of self-conscious thought’s process, the three ‘absolute formsof spirit’.10 The form of spirit’s abstract subjectivity coincides, according to Gentile, with‘pure feeling’ (sentimento puro), which constitutes the specific element of art.11 It is notto be mistaken for the psychological sensations of pleasure and pain, although these latterdo constitute the opposite ‘poles’ of its immanent dialectic, for it is not conditioned byany alleged extramental reality,12 and thus is ‘infinite’. Although acknowledging thatfeeling, art, beauty, etc. are the origin, and even the ‘root’ (radice), of spirit’s wholedevelopment, Gentile emphatically denies that they constitute something more than amerely ‘abstract’, ‘inactual’ moment of it. For in the act of thinking in which they arethought of as such, they necessarily negate themselves as ‘pure’ feeling, ‘pure’ beauty,etc., and rather identify themselves with the very (concrete) objectivity of pure thought.In fact, Gentile says, ‘[k]nowing is identifying, overcoming otherness as such’.13 Thevery moment, then, the self-conscious subject becomes fully aware of the‘intimacy’ (intimità) of its feelings, it cannot but objectify them, and thus transform theminto a thought-content. Not unlike Hegel, Gentile therefore denies any possibleautonomous development of art.14The pure, ‘abstract’ object, we have seen, is the immanent negation of the act ofthinking. Gentile can therefore proceed to set spirit’s unity, universality, necessity,activity, freedom, eternity, etc. over against the radical multiplicity, particularity,contingency, passivity, temporality, etc. of nature, which is just the object of thought as‘immediately’ other than it. He consequently holds to a rigidly deterministic andmechanical conception of nature. For him this is immanent to spirit, but the latter is notimmanent at all to it as such. To the extent that nature’s reality is (abstractly, andtherefore ‘erroneously’) posited, the actuality of the spiritual subject must be negated.This is also the case with the positive (both ‘natural’ and ‘historico-social’) sciences,since they describe or explain an essentially manifold object (the ‘phenomenal’ pluralityof natural ‘facts’ or of historical ‘events’), and, moreover, abstract from its essentialrelation to the self-conscious act of thinking as its ultimate origin and condition ofpossibility. Yet no less abstractly objective, and therefore in the final analysis negativeand ‘erroneous’, than sensible nature and the positive sciences is the intelligiblemultiplicity of the concepts, principles, and logical laws that constitute the subject matterof traditional formal logic. Although the first volume of his Sistema di logica come teoriadel conoscere (A System of Logic as a Theory of Knowing) is devoted to a closeexamination of its fundamental structures,15 such a logic, whose peculiar object hedefines in terms of logo astratto (abstract thought) or of pensiero pensato (thoughtthought of), is radically unable adequately to express the logical essence of thought’s selfconsciousprocess (or autoconcetto). Just as was the case with nature and the positivesciences, Gentile does recognize the necessity of the logo astratto but for no other reasonthan that in his dialectical conception of spirit’s becoming the negative, the ‘abstract’ isno less essential than the positive, the ‘concrete’, to its ‘self-positing’ (autoctisi).As an ‘abstractly’ objective form of spirit Gentile does not hesitate to consider religionitself, both as confessional religiosity16 and as subjective mystical experience. This isbecause religion generally sets against pure self-consciousness, as the creating principleof its being, an absolutely transcendent personal God, who, as such, is obviously an‘other’ with respect to its ‘pure immanence’, and thus an ‘inactual’ abstraction. On theother hand, in mystical experience the subject does try to identify itself with theobjectivity of the ‘divine’, but at the cost of annihilating itself as consciousness, and, afortiori, as self-consciousness.17 Not unlike spirit’s artistic form, then, to Gentile religiontoo remains incurably ‘abstract’. The ‘concrete’ unity of subject and object, therefore, canbe attained only by a higher spiritual form, in which the object is conceived as essentiallyimmanent to the subject, and this latter not as merely ‘subjective’ feeling but as the‘substantial’, ‘objective’ subjectivity of actual thought. And this, of course, can beexplicated only by philosophy, which for Gentile coincides without residue with spirit’sethico-political activity. For it is possible to distinguish them only by somehow opposingthought to action, theory to praxis, or, within the latter, the ‘morality’ of the individual tothe ‘ethicality’ of society (or of the state). Yet for him the very intrinsic absoluteness,creativity and actuality of the autoconcetto excludes in principle the possibility that itmay be conceived as mere theory, as a passive ‘reflection’ of a ‘given’ it does not itself‘posit’. As a consequence, it does not lack that creative energy which traditionalphilosophy (before and after him) is rather inclined to ascribe to the will alone. On theother hand, to Gentile the only concrete effective moral life the human individual canrealize is that which unfolds in the organic, ‘spiritual’ unity of social institutions, fromthe family up to the state.18 The very moment, then, speculative philosophy theoretically‘constructs’ absolute truth in the ‘pure act’ of self-consciousness, it also actualizes itselfin those ethico-political institutions which are the ‘kernel’, as it were, of humanity’sspiritual history.Despite the extremely summary character of this outline of Gentile’s idealism I believethat the reader can easily grasp its fundamental difference from Hegel’s, whose paternity,on the other hand (through the mediation of Spaventa’s interpretation), he openlyrecognizes. Whereas to Hegel there exists a dialectical movement of the logicalcategories and of natural reality which is not yet, as such, (explicitly) self-conscious, toGentile the only possible dialectical process, and then concrete actuality, is that of selfconsciousspirit. Whereas to Hegel an organic, ideological development of the Denken, ofspeculative reason, is immanent in nature (despite its being nothing more than theAbsolute Idea’s self-alienation), to Gentile (not unlike, at least in this regard, Kant andthe positivists old and new) it is nothing more than a dead mechanism determined bymerely quantitative and causal connections. Whereas to Hegel the identity of knowingand the will in the Absolute Idea does not exclude a no less substantial ‘logical’difference between them, which, in the Philosophy of Spirit, renders possible the furtherdistinction between the ‘finite’ sphere of ethico-political life (‘objective’ Spirit) and thehigher one of the artistic, religious and philosophical contemplation of the Absolute(Absolute Spirit), to Gentile there is no other ‘Absolute’ than spirit’s ethico-politicalhistory, nor any other ‘spirit’ than the ‘infinite’ unity of the ‘Ego=Ego’ (i.e., AbsoluteSpirit).To these fundamental differences two others can be added, which seem to me no lessrelevant, although strictly logico-methodological in character. First of all, Hegeliandialectic unfolds in a succession of categories (Denkbestimmungen andBegriffsbestimmungen) in which the preceding are (relatively) more ‘abstract’ than thesubsequent ones, while the latter are (relatively) more ‘concrete’, and constitute the‘truth’ of the former, which are both ‘negated’ and ‘preserved’ (aufgehoben) in them. ToGentile, on the contrary, the ‘concrete’, the ‘Ego=Ego’ is the beginning of the dialecticalprocess not only in the ontological order of reality and truth, but also in themethodological one of its dialectical explication. Second, while to Hegel the speculativesynthesis of opposites constitutes itself as a Stufenfolge, a hierarchical succession ofcategories, or ‘spiritual forms’, more and more adequate to the Absolute’s concreteness,Gentile openly denies that spirit’s development unfolds ‘in a series of typical degrees’.19For its self-identity is equally immanent in all ‘concrete’ moments in which itsevolutionary process is being articulated. In fact, if one should admit, with Hegel, ahierarchy of spiritual forms, the Absolute and the higher ones would turn out to be (atleast relatively) transcendent to the most elementary and inadequate ones. And thiswould undermine the fundamental methodological assumption of ‘actual idealism’: i.e.the ‘absolute immanence’ of truth to self-conscious thought.This is not the place to try to strike a balance (however summary) of Gentile’sphilosophy,20 still less of his ‘reform of Hegelian dialectic’. As compared with thespeculative doctrine from which it stems, it might certainly be regarded as little morethan a mere ‘simplification’21 of it that risks mutilating, if not even irreparably distorting,the rich, systematic complexity of Hegel’s thought. Yet in such a case one would tooeasily forget that that concept of ‘spirit’ as ‘pure act’, on which all of Gentile’s theoreticalreflections and constructions hinge, does constitute the most living, profound and up-todateaspect of the whole Hegelian system. Moreover, while Hegel distinguishes religionfrom philosophy only owing to their ‘form’, and emphatically asserts the identity of their‘content’, thus seeming to forget that according to his own logic22 they on the contrarydetermine each other, Gentile’s distinction between religion as the ‘abstractly objective’form of spirit and philosophy as the fully ‘concrete’ and ‘actual’ one does bring to light adifference concerning their very content, and thus saves—against Hegel—the validity ofhis very principle of the mutual determination of the form and the content of thought.Finally, an undeniably original, creative development of Gentile’s thought with respectto Hegel’s is certainly to be found in his pedagogical theory. The dialectical oppositesthat are constitutive of the educational act, which he conceives as an essentially ‘spiritual’activity, are the subjectivity of the ‘pupil’ and the objectivity of ‘science’, which isembodied in the person of the ‘teacher’. As long as these two terms of the educationalrelation remain in the ‘immediate’ form of their mutual exclusion—which constitutes, assuch, the original ‘antinomy of education’23—no real spiritual progress in the pupil’sself-consciousness can take place. For it to occur, indeed, it is necessary that the lattershould turn the teacher’s objectivity into his or her own self-consciousness, thusbecoming, in a sense, the ‘teacher of himself or herself. In the fullness of the educationalact, Gentile profoundly observes, the pupil ‘does learn, and throbs and lives in theteacher’s word, as if he heard a voice sound in it that bursts out from the inwardness ofhis own being’.24 Any true knowing, therefore, is never mere passive learning of deadand fragmentary notions, but rather free spiritual creation of knowledge by the pupil’sinner personality. The spirit which ‘actually’ thinks, Gentile concludes, is always, in oneway or another, an ‘auto-didact’. From his deep-rooted conception of education as a‘spiritual’ process Gentile does not fail explicitly to draw a consequence that seems to meto be still today of the utmost cultural relevance and upto-dateness. True culture andeducation is only that in which the human mind knows and ‘creates’ itself. Hence it is anessentially humanistic (philosophical) culture and education. Any technological cognitionor ability (which as such constitutes the object of what he calls ‘realistic instruction’),25therefore, can be legitimately ascribed some sort of meaning and value only to the extentthat it constitutes a useful (although of necessity always subordinate) means for thepupil’s spiritual formation, this being in one both philosophical and ethico-political.26‘ABSOLUTE HISTORICISM’: BENEDETTO CROCEBoth to Hegel and to Gentile ‘the Absolute is Subject’, and as such it necessarilymanifests itself in humanity’s historical development. Yet this does not mean at all thatfor them historical reality, as a multiplicity of spiritual ‘facts’ or events, andhistoriography, as the subjective representation of such a reality, constitute, respectively,the unique true actuality, and the only possible ‘objective’ knowledge of which thehuman mind could dispose. Any historico-factual manifestation of the Absolute, as such,is incurably ‘finite’, and thus inadequate to its pure ideal self-identity, whose fullconcreteness is actualized only in the process of ‘absolute knowing’ (Hegel) or of theautoconcetto (Gentile), as absolute identity of knowing and the will. The ‘absolutehistoricism’ of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), on the contrary, aims at resolving withoutresidue any possible reality into historical facticity. The fundamental error of anymetaphysical speculation consist in the filosofismo,27 i.e., in the illegitimate claim that theconcept’s immanent development would of itself be able to offer us an adequateknowledge of objective reality. Croce appeals to Kant’s famous dictum that ‘conceptswithout intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind’, in order tovindicate the element of the intuitive, individual, ‘historical’ representation as anessential condition for any possible knowing. Actual knowledge, then, is neither the pureconcept (as metaphysics, and especially Hegel’s ‘panlogism’, maintains),28 nor thesingular sensuous representation (as empiricism generally holds), but rather the logicalactivity of the ‘individual judgment’,29 in which the human mind predicates of anhistorico-individual ‘fact’ four fundamental ‘categories’ (the Beautiful, the True, theUseful, the Good), to which Croce ascribes universal, necessary and thus a priori validity.But is not nature’s reality itself constituted by a multiplicity of individual ‘facts’, anddo not the natural ‘laws’ which the positive sciences discover in such facts imply somesort of a priori cognitive ‘forms’ (e.g., space and time) or ‘categories’ (causality,substance, etc.) either? Why, then, restrict the area of application of the ‘individualjudgments’ to historical reality alone? Croce resorts to the idealistic principle of theidentity of being and consciousness in order to deny in principle the actuality of anyalleged natural, and then extra-mental, facts. On the other hand, he borrows from one ofthe most fashionable Wissenschaftstheorien (theories of science) of the early 1900s,Mach’s and Avenarius’s ‘empiriocriticism’, the idea that the concepts and laws of thepositive sciences are devoid of intrinsic universality and necessity, and are rather‘abbreviations’ of a contingent plurality of sensuous, particular representations, which areworked out only in view of their practical utility, this consisting in the ‘economy’ ofmental ‘effort’ which their employment would allow to the scientists.30Having denied the reality of the Absolute and of nature, and consequently the truth ofmetaphysics and the positive sciences, Croce can easily identify the whole theoreticalactivity of the human mind with historiography. Philosophical knowledge differs from itonly as the reflective explication of the conditions for the possibility of those ‘logical apriori syntheses’ (the ‘individual judgments’) which the actual historiographical praxismostly carries out in an unconscious way. Contrary to what all great metaphysicians hadconcordantly maintained, then, philosophy can no longer be regarded as an ‘autonomous’science but as the mere ‘methodological moment of historiography’.31 Its specific subjectmatter would consist, in substance, in a clarification of the contents and mutual relationsof those a priori categories which constitute, as we have seen, an essential moment of the‘individual judgments’. The category of the Beautiful coincides with spirit’s artisticactivity, or sense-perception, and its essential products are just those individual intuitiverepresentations which become the subject of the judgments laid down by spirit’s logicalactivity.32 This latter, then, does not exhaust as such the essence of the category of theTrue, whose concrete content, rather, turns into the multiplicity of the individualjudgments historical knowledge consists of. As to the category of the Useful, accordingto Croce it defines a form of spirit’s activity no less concrete and ‘autonomous’ than art,knowledge or morality. In this regard, the influence of Marx’s thought on Croce, throughthe mediation of its ‘humanistic’ interpretation worked out by Labriola at the end of thenineteenth century (see p. 350), is undeniable.33 Unlike Hegel and Gentile, whoemphasize the fact that the economic activity of the human mind is but the ‘phenomenal’,‘negative’, ‘abstract’ side of the only true practical activity, i.e., moral activity as socialmorality (Sittlichkeit, eticità) or ethico-political praxis, to Croce the world of economicprocesses and relations instead constitutes a fully actual and autonomous factor in humanhistory. Of course, since Croce identifies being in general with history, and defines thislatter in terms of ‘spirit’, he can acknowledge the actual reality of economy only byinterpreting the latter as a human activity no less ‘spiritual’ than, e.g., aestheticcontemplation or historical knowledge. As to the category of the Good, finally, Crocedecidedly rejects Hegel and Gentile’s contention that it can be concretely embodied onlyin social institutions. As was already the case with Kant, he confines moral activity to theprivate sphere of individual conscience, or, at best, to those social relations which anindividual can freely join.These are the main lines of the ‘philosophy of spirit’ set forth by Croce in his four‘systematic’ works: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale(Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics) (1902 [10.15]), Logicacome scienza del concetto puro (Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept) (1905[10.16]), Filosofia della pratica (The Philosophy of Practice) (1908 [10.18]), and Teoriae storia della storiografia (A Theory and History of Historiography) (1917 [10.19]). Inthe later years of his long literary, philosophical and political career, he seemed deeply tomodify such a conception, at least with respect to two fundamental issues. On the onehand, in his Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (A History of Europe in theNineteenth Century) (1932 [10.20]),34 he sees at the root of the progressive historicalrealization of the ethico-political ideal of ‘liberalism’ the spiritual energy of a new‘religion’, although non-confessional in character: the so-called ‘religion of freedom’. Inthe systematic exposition of his ‘philosophy of spirit’, on the contrary, religion is notregarded as a peculiar form of spirit’s activity. On the other hand, in his La storia comepensiero e come azione (History as Thought and as Action) (1938 [10.22]),35 he deniesthat the category of the Good constitutes, as such, a ‘distinct’ and autonomous form ofspirit’s life. Now morality seems to him to turn without residue into each of the threeprevious categories: the True, the Beautiful, and the Useful. Furthermore, in an essaycollected in his last book, Indagini sullo Hegel e schiarimenti filosofici (Inquiries intoHegel and Philosophical Explanations) (1952 [10.23]),36 he stresses the spiritual form of‘vitality’ (vitalità)—which coincides, at least prima facie, with the category of theUseful—as the unique, common origin and ‘root’ of all the ‘distinct’ forms of spirit,whose ‘autonomy’, on the contrary, he had once so emphatically vindicated.Despite the wide influence exerted by Croce’s ‘historicism’ on twentieth-centuryItalian and European culture, I do not believe that he was actually able to offer aspeculatively relevant contribution to the development of philosophical thought in ourage. Elsewhere I have pointed out those which seem to me to be the fundamentalshortcomings both of his general conception of history and, in particular, of his logic.37Here I can confine myself to remarking that Croce’s negation of the possibility ofmetaphysics is based upon the uncritical ontological presupposition of the actual realityof the ‘finite’ (as ‘historical fact’). As soon as its intrinsic negativity becomes evident toself-conscious reflection, the radical inconsistency of such a presupposition can easily beunmasked. Second, the empiriocriticistic and Crocean denial of the universality of theconcepts and laws of the positive sciences turns out to be possible only by surreptitiouslypresupposing the immediate evidence of sense-perception, which in truth is no lessnegative and contradictory than the ‘finite’ as such. Third, Croce declares that the four‘categories’ in which he articulates the essence of spirit’s development are a priori, i.e.,‘universal’ or absolute (and this is just the reason why, as against historical relativism, hedefines his own philosophy as ‘absolute historicism’). A merely historico-inductivejustification of their peculiar content and relations, then, is clearly out of place. The onlypossible foundation of their objective validity would obviously be their‘deduction’ (however this may be conceived). Now, in no passage of his extensivewritings does Croce appear to be able to provide us with the least ‘deduction’ of thespecific categorial content of his ‘theory of the distincts’, and still less with any coherentconception of their mutual ‘dialectical’ relations. On the other hand, the groundlessnessof his claim that they are a priori is proved ad oculos by his subsequent reduction of theirnumber through the suppression of the category of the Good as an autonomous form ofspirit’s life as well as by his conclusive resolution of the whole categorial order into thesensuous immediacy of the vitalità. Fourth, how is it possible meaningfully to speak of analleged ‘religion of freedom’ while at the same time openly denying (unlike Gentile andHegel!) that religion as such is a specific form of spirit’s dialectical development?Finally, Croce’s vindication of the a priori character of the category of the Useful and,correlatively, of the ‘spiritual’ value and meaning of man’s economic activity as suchclearly implies the absurd transmogrification of a merely external and finite categorialrelation such as that of ‘utility’38 into a self-contained, ‘infinite’ concept, since anyauthentic ‘spiritual’ category must necessarily be such. The final outcome of Croce’scritical destruction of metaphysics in general, and especially of his sometimes veryvirulent polemic against Hegel’s and Gentile’s thought, then, appears to be, on the onehand, the sanctification of the most immediate, arbitrary and egoistic utilitarian interestsof the ‘private’ individuals, and, on the other, the replacement of the living profundity ofspeculative thought with the dead superficiality of the most trivial and fragmentaryhistorical erudition.HISTORICAL RELATIVISM AND SCEPTICISMDespite his polemic against Hegel and Gentile, Croce’s historicism nevertheless holds totwo fundamental assumptions of any idealistic philosophy: i.e., the identification of beingwith consciousness and the distinction, within the latter, between a system of universal(absolute) categories (or ‘values’) and the multiplicity of the particular, contingentrepresentations which they somehow determine and qualify. A widespread theoreticaland historiographical trend in twentieth-century Italian philosophy, represented especiallyby former fellows of Croce and Gentile, although holding fast to the first assumption,decidedly rejects the second. It is a ‘dogmatic’ prejudice, they acknowledge, to assert theactuality of a reality different from, and transcendent to, human consciousness—broadlyspeaking, of an ‘external world’ (however this may be conceived). Yet this would notimply at all that there exists something like a Universal Consciousness or an AbsoluteSubject, or a mere plurality of a priori concepts, unifying the multiplicity of individualconsciousnesses and of their historical, temporal and subjective contents in a universallyvalid objective experience. The very idea of ‘truth’ as an absolute norm and principle ofhuman knowledge is regarded as nothing more than a ‘metaphysical prejudice’. Not onlydo they deny the existence of a unique, universal truth, of which the manifold determinatetruths would be but internal, organic manifestations, but human knowing could not evencome to any intrinsic, ‘apodeictic’ certainty of the specific content of a mere plurality offinite, particular truths. Any judgments that can be actually stated, indeed, are alwaysmerely ‘problematic’. According to the problematicismo of Ugo Spirito (1896–1979),such a relativistic, and in the final analysis sceptical, conception of knowing would be theunavoidable outcome of Gentile’s dialectical logic itself. This, as we have seen, identifiesthe essence of spirit with its becoming. Yet as a ‘theory of spirit as pure act’ it cannot butnegate itself as becoming to the very extent that it claims a priori, and thus immutableand eternal, validity for its own theoretical tenets. As a consequence, one can do justice toreality’s intimate processuality only by denying, in principle, the possibility of anythinglike a ‘general theory of spirit’—more generally, of metaphysics as such.39 Reality wouldthus turn into a ‘historical’ flux of states of consciousness, in which any alleged universalor absolute truth and reality dissolves, as a follower of Spirito puts it, into ‘anunrestrainable rhapsody of sensations’.40 Any human knowledge would consist ofnothing other than mere ‘[probabilistic assertions, hypotheses and conjectures’, and these‘are propositions which reality itself, in its daily or even hourly becoming, undertakes tocompromise in their objectivity and to defeat in their claim to universality’.41 Accordingto Raffaello Franchini (1920–90), metaphysics and (historical) becoming ‘cannot getalong with each other’,42 and the former’s claim to an ‘absolute unification’ and to‘conclusiveness’ must give place to the ‘infinity of particular researches’.43 ‘Thesurvival…of the metaphysical conception of philosophy is very harmful to philosophyitself.’44 Although not hesitating to see in Croce’s historicism the epilogue andculmination of the whole history of western dialectic,45 Franchini declares that not evenCroce ‘can avoid paying a tribute to the archaic philosophy of Being, despite his effectivepolemic against it’.46 Such a tribute would obviously consist in his ‘systematic’conception of spirit’s forms as ‘distinct’ a priori categories, whereas they too would benothing else than the product of ‘a distinguishing activity, which in the final analysis isthe judgement which Croce himself did not by chance call “historical”’,47 i.e. merelycontingent and relative.It is out of place to go deeply here into a more detailed exposition and critique of the‘problematistic’ and ‘relativistic’ outcomes of Italian idealism. In this context it willsuffice to point out that, first of all, there is no actual contradiction between spirit’sessential becoming and its reflective self-comprehension in a (metaphysical) ‘theory’provided that the former is conceived (as with Gentile no less than with Hegel) not asmere temporal change but as ‘eternal process’: not as a simple negation of the eternal’sself-identity, but as a self-identity which eternally ‘returns-into-itself from its ‘selfalienation’.48 Second, ‘problematicism’ and ‘historical relativism’, like any more or lessradically sceptical sort of relativistic subjectivism, is plainly a self-refuting philosophicalconception. For on the one hand it denies the metaphysical ideal of an absolute,‘definitive’ truth; on the other, it undeniably ascribes absolute, ‘definitive’ value to itsunjustified and unjustifiable, and therefore ‘dogmatic’,49 denial of truth.‘CRITICAL ONTOLOGY’: PANTALEO CARABELLESENot unlike Croce’s ‘historicism’ or Spirito’s ‘problematicism’, the philosophy ofPantaleo Carabellese (1877–1948) can itself be safely regarded as a critical reaction to‘actual idealism’. Yet what he sets against Gentile’s metaphysics of the ‘pure act’ is not asubjectivistic and relativistic conception of historical becoming so much as an ‘ontology’of the ‘pure Object’, of absolute Being. In any case, such an ontology is still based uponan idealistic conception of reality (unlike all the other trends of twentieth-century‘metaphysics of Being’, which I shall examine below) in that Carabellese shares withGentile and Croce the fundamental epistemological assumption that ‘being is inconsciousness’.50 Hence he explicitly disallows any attempt to ‘overcome’51consciousness and to make the latter dependent, in the manner either of naturalisticempiricism or of traditional dualistic metaphysics, on a reality radically alien to it. Anypossible actuality is either an act, or an object (a content), of consciousness. The peculiarproblematic of metaphysics thus comes to coincide, for Carabellese, with a ‘critical’analysis of the immanent formal-general structures of consciousness as the only‘concrete’ reality. He distinguishes in it two ‘transcendental conditions’ mutuallyconnected: the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’; and three ‘determinate forms’ of its activity,which also imply one another: ‘feeling’, ‘knowledge’ and the ‘will’. In each of the latterit is possible to bring out a peculiar configuration of the subject-object relation.Carabellese’s whole polemic against Gentile is rooted in a different, and even alternative,conception of such a relation. Setting out from Kant’s famous contention that the‘objectivity’ of a perception coincides with its intersubjective validity, i.e. with its‘universality’, he identifies the very essence of the object as such with the most‘universal’ concept, i.e. the indeterminate ‘idea of Being’. Yet this latter, as Rosmini (seep. 350) had already pointed out against Kant,52 is not to be regarded as the product of anact of the knowing subject. Rather, it is passively ‘given’ to it. But what about the‘singular’ objects, e.g. ‘this’ pen ‘here’? Carabellese appeals in this regard to Berkeley’simmaterialism, and emphatically denies that consciousness can actually refer to anextended, material, bodily, etc. object.53 The only objective actuality it can become awareof is a ‘spiritual reality’, and this coincides with the universal idea of Being. The subjectof the act of consciousness, on the contrary, must necessarily be merely ‘singular’: ‘oneamong many’, a ‘monad’54 bearing a relation of ‘mutual otherness’55 to infinite otherpossible singular subjects. As a consequence, contrary to what Kant, Hegel and Gentileheld, the unity of conscious experience cannot be the result of a spontaneous ‘synthesis’by the subject (for this is ‘in itself’ merely passive and manifold). It will therefore berendered possible by the object alone, which, as universal, is also of necessity unique.56The universal uniqueness of the object, then, unifies the singular plurality of thesubjects; these latter, conversely, individuate the indeterminate universality of idealBeing. As we have already said, this takes place in three ‘determinate forms ofconsciousness’, to which three distinct ideal objectivities correspond: to feeling the ideaof the Beautiful, to knowing the idea of the True, to willing the idea of the Good. Inpolemic with Gentile, who held ‘pure feeling’ to be ‘inactual’, and identified knowingwith the will in the concrete actuality of the transcendental Ego (see p. 356), Carabellesevindicates, no less emphatically than Croce, the mutual autonomy of such concepts (and,of course, of the corresponding forms of consciousness). Hence it turns out to beimpossible to raise any of them to the unconditioned principle of the others. Yet, unlikeCroce, he not only excludes economic activity (and the corresponding category of theUseful) from his ‘table’ of the ‘determinate forms of consciousness’, but also tries tooffer something like a ‘deduction’ of their specific content, which should bestow on themthat necessity of which Croce’s ‘theory of the distincts’, as we have seen, is devoid. Inthis regard, Carabellese appeals to consciousness’s temporal form. While Kant regardedtime as the mere form of ‘inner sense’, according to Carabellese it expresses rather theinmost essence of the whole life of consciousness.57 Hence he thinks it possible to‘deduce’ from the three ‘moments’ involved in the essence of time—past, present andfuture—the concepts of the True, of the Beautiful, and of the Good in the following way:In the certainty of having already been, the subjects are said intellect, the objectis said true, and the concrete act is said knowledge; therefore knowledge isconsciousness of the being that was, is consciousness of the past. In thecertainty of being now, instead, the subjects are said feeling; the object is saidbeautiful, and the concrete act is said intuition; this therefore is consciousness ofthe being that is, is consciousness of the present. Finally, in the certainty ofhaving to be [dover essere], the subject is said the will, the object is said good,and the concrete act is said action. This therefore is consciousness of the beingthat will be, consciousness of the future.58Unlike Gentile (and Hegel), Carabellese refuses to deduce from the idealisticprinciple of the identity of being and consciousness the further consequence thatthe truth of immediate consciousness is the pure act of self-consciousness. Forin such an act the Ego should be the object of itself; but to Carabellese, as weknow, the object is essentially distinct from the subject (although beingimmanent in, and inseparable from, it). I therefore can be conscious of an objectdifferent from me (i.e., the idea of Being), but cannot possibly become aware ofmy own conscious act. The resolution of the objectifying act of consciousnessinto pure self-consciousness thus appears to Carabellese to be nothing less than‘the fundamental falsehood’ of ‘post-Kantian idealism’.59A summary critical examination of Carabellese’s ontology suffices to showthat it is certainly not preferable to Croce’s ‘historicism’ as a plausiblealternative to ‘actual idealism’.60 First of all, his attempt to deduce the‘determinate forms of consciousness’ from the essence of temporality is quiteunsuccessful. His raising of temporality from a mere form of ‘inner sense’ to theconstitutive structure of consciousness as such appears to be wholly arbitraryand unjustified. He does not seem to realize the intrinsic negativity(contradictoriness) of temporality, of whose ‘moments’ the past and the future,as such, are not, and the (sensuous) present is but an abstract, unreal limitbetween them. Moreover, if the origin of the concept of the True (and ofknowing) lay in the temporal moment of the past, not only would the knowledgeof the present and the future be obviously impossible, but also any logical andmetaphysical knowing whatsoever (for this as such transcends the whole sphereof temporality). No less inconsistent is Carabellese’s identification of thesubject’s essence with the ‘plural singularity’, and of that of the object with theunique universality of the idea of Being. As Kant himself, to whose authorityCarabellese so often resorts, had already shown, I can become aware of amultiplicity (be it objective or subjective, and, in the latter case, be it the‘manifold’ of the states of consciousness within the single subject or an‘intersubjective’ plurality of individual subjects) only if I keep self-identicalduring the whole process of knowing in which I become aware of such amultiplicity. It is, then, the absolute identity of the self-conscious Ego, and notthat of the object, which renders possible, in the final analysis, the ‘syntheticunity’ of concrete experience. Moreover, on what grounds can I assert that theobject is ‘in itself’ unique? In effect, apart from the fact that sense-perceptionmanifests an indefinite plurality of singular objects (‘this’ pen ‘here’, etc.), allobjective concepts too, as determined, are essentially manifold. Only theindeterminate idea of Being is likely to be actually ‘unique’. Yet, just asindeterminate, it is, in truth, but a mere ‘abstraction’, an empty nothing. How,then, can it render possible the objective unity of the ‘concrete’ as consciousness?Finally, Carabellese does not realize that his denial of the possibility ofself-consciousness undermines nothing less than the most original conditions forthe possibility of his own idea of philosophy as a ‘critique of the concrete’. Forwe already know that to Carabellese the ‘concrete’ coincides withconsciousness, and that his ‘critique of the concrete’ consequently turns into areflective explication of consciousness’s formal-general structures. Such anexplication is obviously an act of consciousness. But its object, unlike that of‘immediate’ consciousness, is by no means the indeterminate idea of Being, butthe very concrete actuality of knowledge, so that it clearly takes the shape of adeterminate form of pure self-consciousness, whose real possibility, then, it assuch proves, as it were, ad oculos.‘MYSTICAL IDEALISM’: PIETRO MARTINETTIWhen outlining the historical genesis of ‘actual idealism’ I have remarked that it stemsfrom Hegel’s idealism through the mediation of its interpretation by Spaventa in thenineteenth century. And the conceptions of thinkers such as Croce, Carabellese, Spirito,etc., can to a great extent be regarded as a mere reaction to Gentile’s philosophy. Thethought of Pietro Martinetti (1872–1943), on the contrary, derives both its concreteproblematic and its fundamental speculative inspiration from a direct, and very detailed,acquaintance with the German idealistic tradition from Kant61 to the neo-Kantianism ofRiehl, Wundt and others. Not unlike the other exponents of Italian idealism, however, forhim too the term ‘idealism’ fundamentally means an epistemological conception of thesubject-object relationship according to which the latter is nothing more (nor less) than apure immanent content of consciousness. The entire world-becoming thus turns withoutresidue into that of consciousness. ‘[T]he reality which is given us in perception isconscious reality itself, and nothing other than it.’62 If consciousness is considered fromthe standpoint of its immanent multiplicity, it constitutes the object. If, conversely, it isconsidered from the viewpoint of its active, unifying function, it constitutes the subject orthe ‘Ego’ stricto sensu. The peculiar orientation of Martinetti’s philosophical idealismwith respect to that of Croce, Gentile or Carabellese is revealed, in my opinion, by twofundamental aspects of his thought. On the one hand, he seems to hold that a clearunderstanding of consciousness’s process can be offered us rather by a psychologicalanalysis of our inner experience than by a purely logical deduction of its a priori forms(Fichte, Hegel). Indeed, he does not hesitate to define his own position in terms of‘psychological idealism’,63 and to lay down a very favourable judgment about the‘idealistic empiricism flourishing in contemporary philosophy’64—for exampleSchopenhauer’s theory of ‘representation’ or Schuppe’s and Schubert-Soldern’s‘philosophy of immanence’. But, on the other hand, no less crucial than the influence ofthat ‘psychologism’ which held sway over German thought at the end of the nineteenthcentury is that of pantheistic mysticism—from the Indian philosophy of the ‘system’Sankhya (to which he devoted his doctoral dissertation) to the metaphysics of Plotinus,Spinoza65 and the later Fichte. In substance, according to Martinetti, the analysis ofpsychological experience is a necessary moment of the process of knowing, but only asthe groundwork for the construction of an ‘idealistic metaphysics’66 of the Absolute as animmanent Whole.The fundamental philosophical principle bestowing unity and coherence onMartinetti’s thought, in fact, has little or nothing to do, in my opinion, with psychologicalexperience, but seems rather to coincide with the chief speculative assumption ofPlotinus’s metaphysics.67 The most universal categories on the basis of which it ispossible to interpret to totality of experience are Unity and Multiplicity. Contrary to whatHegel (and, before him, Plato himself at least in the Parmenides) maintained, they are, assuch, mutually exclusive. This means that in an entity, experience or concrete spiritualactivity, the more the moment of unity prevails, the less relevant the role played bymultiplicity becomes, and conversely. The implications of such an assumption are notonly ontological but also axiological and ethical in character. Unity is the principle of theintelligibility and ‘perfection’ of an entity; multiplicity, on the contrary, that of itsirrationality and ‘imperfection’. As a consequence, the differences revealed by ourexperience of the world and the Ego are ordered in a hierarchical succession, at the lowerlevels of which the moment of multiplicity predominates, while unity is the peculiarfeature of the higher ones. Absolute Reality, therefore, is to be identified with anabsolutely ‘formal’, ‘indeterminate’ Unity, devoid of any content, properties, relations,etc., since these are all clearly unthinkable apart from the manifold. Any other form ofunity, even the ‘concrete unity’ of the system of Plato’s ‘ideas’ or of Hegel’s ‘categories’,is but mere appearance. Since intelligent activity too involves a manifold content (theplurality of the concepts which it distinguishes and/or unifies), the Absolute Unitynecessarily transcends intelligence itself. ‘But also this intelligible world is nothing elsethan a relative expression of a unity which in itself transcends intelligence.’68 This latter,Martinetti rightly points out, is but a ‘development’ (potenziamento) of ‘consciousness’.As a consequence, the Absolute Unity will transcend the totality of conscious experienceas well: ‘the highest constructions of logical thought are imperfect expressions of aReality whose absolute unity transcends any consciousness’.69 Although, then, all of ourworld-experience turns without residue into a dynamic, hierarchical succession of formsand states of consciousness, the ultimate aim (which to Martinetti, just as to Hegel, is atthe same time the ‘absolute foundation’ of the whole cosmic becoming) of its evolution isnot a possible act or content of consciousness.It should be noted, however, that Martinetti’s insistence on the absoluteepistemological transcendence of Unity to consciousness does not exclude anunambiguous vindication of its substantial ontological immanence to the multiplicity ofphenomenal experience. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Martinetti’s metaphysicsseems to me to be precisely his unrelenting polemic against the traditional theisticconception of God as an absolutely transcendent, ‘otherworldly’ entity. For him, on thecontrary, the absolute, ‘divine’ unity is immanent even in the most negligible details ofworld-becoming.And therefore, as Leibniz already saw, every single phenomenon alwaysexpresses in the unity it realizes the unity of the world to which it belongs;every most simple unity reflects, owing to the infinite multiplicity of its factors,the universal order of existences; every most trifling being encloses in themystery of its laws the secret of the world.70The vulgar conception of the (first) cause as external to its effects (causa transiens) is tobe rejected in toto. For the a priori necessity of their connection can be accounted foronly by presupposing the intrinsic identity of them as their common foundation. But thecause, in truth, is not only identical with its effects: rather, it ‘potentiates’, ‘reveals’ itselfin them.71 In polemic with Aquinas and, more generally, with the whole scholasticontology, Martinetti therefore declares: ‘The whole system of the forms in re and postrem dissolves in such a case as an unhelpful complication. The world is but the verysystem of the divine thoughts, of the forms ante rem, that, before the obscure power ofsense, as it were breaks and is refracted in the indefinite multiplicity of sensuousappearances.’72Martinetti’s reference to the ‘obscure power of sense’ in this passage is critical for theinterpretation and evaluation of his whole philosophy. For his doctrine of sensibleknowledge is perhaps that which gives rise to the greatest difficulties in his theoreticalperspective. I have said that to Martinetti the manifold is a principle of unreality andimperfection, and that the more the process of consciousness approximates the AbsoluteUnity, the less relevant the former’s actuality becomes. ‘Sensible intuition’ is obviouslythe most rudimentary phase in consciousness’s development, since its content coincideswith the heterogeneous, unreal multiplicity of material things and of sensuous qualities. Aloose unification of the manifold is rendered possible, within the sphere of sense, by the(relatively) a priori functions73 of ‘space’ and ‘time’. The whole sphere of spatiotemporalreality, then, becomes the content of further, higher-order logical unificationsby virtue of the fundamental categories of ‘causality’74 and ‘logical identity’.75 Now, notunlike Hegel, Martinetti explicitly declares that in the evolution of a lower form of spiritinto a higher one the latter represents the ‘truth’, the ‘actual reality’ of the former, whichwith respect to it turns out to be ‘virtually negated’: ‘the logical unity is not a realitycoexisting with pure sensuous multiplicity, is not a reality of the same degree, but is aqualitatively higher reality, which virtually denies sensuous reality.’76 Yet, on the otherhand, he tries to differentiate his own position in this regard from Hegel’s ‘panlogism’ byasserting that the logical unification of the sensuous ‘given’ does not undermine itsautonomous, independent reality: ‘An abyss subsists between the logical world ofpanlogism and sensuous reality.’ ‘The sensible and the logical order are two absolutelydistinct orders, and their forced overlapping only succeeds in bringing out—here betterthan elsewhere—the absolute impossibility of making them coincide.’77 The sharpcontradiction in which Martinetti’s thought here gets entangled is self-evident. In effect,in the final passage of his major work he himself somehow tries to solve it by declaringthat ‘if from the logical viewpoint the distinction between logical and sensuous realityturns into the distinction between being and not-being…from the absolute viewpoint bothare but two subsequent forms of one reality, which in its absolute form is neither the onenor the other’.78 Yet we know that for Martinetti the ‘absolute viewpoint’ is that of theabsolutely ‘formal’ Unity, which as such radically transcends any consciousness andintelligence. How, then, can we take up such an alleged ‘absolute viewpoint’? The‘logical’ viewpoint therefore remains the only one we can legitimately resort to (and,strictly speaking, not only ‘we’, but also a possible infinite ‘divine’ intelligence). Hencehis vindication of the original autonomy of sensuous reality is clearly self-refuting, andconsequently his attempt to differentiate his own position from Hegel’s ‘panlogism’ turnsout to be, at least in this regard, quite unsuccessful.The other fundamental objections that Martinetti’s idealistic monism raises againstHegel’s philosophy concern the dialectical method; his doctrine of the immanentbecoming of the logical Idea; his identification of the latter with the very AbsoluteReality; and finally his ‘realistic’ admission of the possibility of a philosophy of ‘nature’as the process of the Idea in a still ‘unconscious form’. Given the validity of the idealisticprinciple of the identity of being and consciousness, how can one still deem it possible toconstruct a priori a succession of natural categories that is not, at the same time, thecontent of a series of subjective ‘syntheses’ of consciousness? Martinetti’s reproach toHegel’s thought, in this regard, is clearly that it is not yet sufficiently ‘idealistic’. It seemsto me to be historically enlightening to point out that the gist of this Martinetti objectioncoincides in toto with one of the fundamental results of Gentile’s ‘reform of Hegeliandialectic’: i.e., the denial of the possibility of any dialectical process which is not the purebecoming of the pensiero pensante, i.e. of the self-conscious Ego (p. 356).As for the relation between the Hegelian Idea and Absolute Reality, it is undeniablethat, if the latter really is, as Martinetti maintains, a Unity which transcends anymultiplicity, and therefore the very element of consciousness and intelligence, it cannotpossibly coincide with Hegel’s Absolute Idea, which is indeed the pure selfconsciousnessof a systematic totality of thought-determinations. Moreover, anybecoming (be it temporal or logical) is clearly possible and thinkable only as a synthesisof unity (continuity) and multiplicity (discretion, as the plurality of the successive‘phases’ discernible in it). If, then, Absolute Reality is actually devoid of any multiplicitywhatsoever, becoming must certainly be nothing more than a mere ‘phenomenon’. TheAbsolute Unity, therefore, is eo ipso absolutely motionless and static. Finally, accordingto Martinetti (who strangely seems to share, in this regard, some of the most populartenets of contemporary logical empiricism), there are only two scientifically valid‘logical’ methods: ‘analysis’, which is merely formal and reconstructive in character; and‘synthesis’, or ‘induction’, which consequently is the only method actually able originallyto constitute, and then to extend, our knowledge. The latter’s ‘genetic order’, he says, ‘isinvariably inductive, and springs forth from a unique source which is experience’.79 As aconsequence, induction is the proper method not only of the positive sciences but also ofphilosophy itself. As a consequence, the only real difference between them is that, whilethe positive sciences limit themselves to a more or less ‘relative’ unification of themultiplicity of the immediate ‘given’, philosophy on the contrary essentially aspires to a‘total’, ‘absolute’ unification. The undeniable non-inductive character of Hegel’sdialectical method, then, would ineluctably undermine the ‘scientificity’ of his‘panlogistic’ conception of the Absolute. In Martinetti’s critique of Hegelianism, then,(psychological) empiricism and (immanentistic) mysticism work hand in hand in asomewhat surprising way. While, indeed, his rejection of the dialectical method (like histheory of sensible intuition I have outlined above) relies on arguments of clear empiricistorigin, his polemic against Hegel’s Absolute Reason has no other ground, nor any otheraim (so at least I believe), than the vindication of the ontological and ethical primacy ofmystical-religious experience over rational-philosophical thought. In fact, on oneoccasion he does not hesitate openly to define in terms of ‘mysticism’ the deepestpossible form of unity between the Absolute and the human mind: ‘our knowing…is anact of mystical union with the eternal Logos which is the absolute ground of ournature.’80The plausibility of Martinetti’s anti-Hegelian polemic thus appears to depend in totoupon two decisive speculative assumptions: (1) the epistemological validity of induction;and (2) the ontological reality of an absolute Unity absolutely devoid of any moment ofdifference or multiplicity. But, in truth, Aristotle and Kant had insightfully pointed outalready in the antinomy of ‘complete induction’ the irremediable shortcoming of theinductive method; and Plato, in his Parmenides, had already brilliantly shown that thestatement ‘The One is’ actually means the very opposite of what it purports to mean, i.e.the unreality of the One as One. For the existential predicate ‘is’ constitutes of itself anelement different from it, and thus immediately posits an original manifold in the allegedpure ‘unity’ of the One itself.METAPHYSICS OF BEINGThe peremptory rejection of the ‘idealistic’ identification of being and consciousness andthe unrelenting polemic against all the logical, metaphysical and ethical consequencesdrawn from it by both Croce and Gentile constitute the fundamental and historically mostrelevant features of a widespread tendency in twentieth-century Italian philosophy whichone could generally define in terms of ‘metaphysics of Being’.81 The divergences amongthe spiritual traditions of (1) Thomism, (2) Augustine’s and Rosmini’s ‘spiritualism’, and(3) Kierkegaard’s mystical irrationalism—to which thinkers such as (1) Armando Carlini(1878–1959), Augusto Guzzo (1894–1986), Gustavo Bontadini (1903–90), and MicheleFederico Sciacca (1908–79), (2) Francesco Olgiati (1886–1968) and (3) Luigi Pareyson(1918–91) respectively go back—turn out to be negligible as compared with thesubstantial affinity of both the theoretical content and the historico-cultural finalities oftheir philosophical activity. Being, Truth, the Absolute, God, they maintain, radicallytranscend the whole sphere of self-consciousness, and especially the activity of rationalthought. Even those who are most willing to acknowledge the actuality and value ofspeculative reason, i.e. the neo-Thomists, hold nevertheless that this is a function of spiritwhich is in the final analysis subordinate (or rather: ‘subaltern’) to an alleged moreoriginal immediate intuition of the ‘idea of Being’—and, a fortiori, to religious revelationsuch as is sanctioned by the authority of the Roman Catholic church, and to mysticalexperience. ‘The absolute objective truth’, Sciacca declares, ‘is before its being known,and it would remain such even though no thinking subject ever knew, or sought for, it.’82‘[T]he ratio is a cognitive power inferior to the intellectus, on which it depends.’83 ‘Whatcounts,’ Pareyson echoes him, ‘is not reason, but truth.’84 The vindication of the absoluteepistemological transcendence of truth to human self-consciousness finds a closecounterpart, at the ontological level, in their common intent to ‘restore’, as Bontadiniopenly says, in contemporary philosophy and culture a decidedly ‘dualistic’ conception85of the relations between God and man, process and eternity, spirit and nature, the Oneand the Many, etc. ‘[Transcendence means duality, immanence means monism’, Sciaccaasserts. ‘The condition of culture turns out to us still to be the dualistic conception of thereality of “this” world and of that of the “other” world, of the world of man and of theworld of God.’86 ‘Hegel’s Gottin-Werden [God-in-becoming] is a nonsense, in that oneuses the term “God”, but one ascribes to him a predicate that denies him, that is contraryto his nature.’87 From this dualistic ontological perspective the reality of nature, of life, ofthe ‘cosmos’ cannot obviously but be regarded as something quite alien to spirit, and assuch even unworthy of philosophical consideration. ‘Analogy’, Guzzo maintains, ‘can beheld to be the only means truly fit to dispel any temptation of identifying nature and man,either in the naturalistic sense of a reabsorption of man into nature or in the sense of anidealistic epistemology which aims at drawing back and dissolving “nature” into“spirit”’,88 In his polemic against the metaphysical reality of nature, Carlini goes as far asto accuse of cosmologismo, i.e. of naturalism, the very ‘Christian Neoplatonism with itsEns Realissimum’!89According to Olgiati, ‘if there were no realities there would be no relations, for it is notthe relations which create reality, but it is reality which gives rise to the relations’.90 InBradley’s terminology one could say that the fundamental ontological point this neo-Thomist intends to make is that the only actual relations are the ‘external’ ones occurringamong an original plurality of logically indifferent entities that are irreducible to anyhigher, more concrete Unity or organic Totality. No surprise, then, that in the light ofsuch an ontological conception of reality as mere plurality the only concept of man’spersonality that appears to be tenable to the upholders of the metaphysics of Being is stillthat of the traditional ‘soul-substance’, i.e. of a self-contained, finite and contingententity. ‘[T]he concept of person’, a follower of Sciacca observes, ‘cannot avoid thatindividualistic-intimistic closure which seems to be wholly peculiar to the level ofsingularity.’91 Its only possibility of, and hope for, ‘immortality’, consequently, far fromconsisting in its absolute identity with the Totality of the cosmos and human history, willrather coincide with its alleged indefinite duration ‘after death’ in the temporal dimensionof the future: i.e., as Sciacca openly declares, with its ‘ultramundane [ultraterreno]destiny’.92If it is an indisputable merit of the upholders of the metaphysics of Being to haverevived interest in the metaphysical problem in contemporary philosophy, one must alsoacknowledge that its statement and solution in the ambit of their philosophicalperspective does appear to be wholly unsatisfying. The fundamental concept of ‘Being’they concordantly resort to as the first and most original truth of the human ‘intellect’,indeed, is but a dead, unfruitful, unthinkable abstraction—both because it is devoid ofany determinate content whatsoever and because it presupposes the actual abstractionfrom the concrete becoming of the ‘act of thinking’, of which, in truth, such a concept is amere product, and which is thus necessarily presupposed by any alleged categorialnegation of it. In other words, the self-conscious (‘subjective’) process of thinking cannotpossibly be transcended, and consequently the object is originally and substantiallyidentical with the subject. The dualistic conception of reality, which is on the contrarybased on the original opposition of subject and object, is therefore inconsistent anduntenable, and any attempt to ‘restore’ it in the spiritual life of contemporary humanityappears to be ineluctably destined to failure.93MARXISM AND PHENOMENOLOGYWhile for the upholders of the metaphysics of Being the fundamental shortcoming ofCroce’s and Gentile’s idealism consists in its rigorously ‘immanentistic’ and/or‘historicistic’ orientation, most theorists of twentieth-century Italian Marxism, on thecontrary, regard it as the most ‘living’ and up-to-date legacy of the idealistic-Hegeliantradition (if not even of the whole history of ‘bourgeois’ philosophy). One can distinguishthree main trends in Italian Marxism just on the basis of their different relation to thattradition. According to Antonio Gramsci (1890–1937), ‘in a sense…the philosophy ofpraxis [i.e., Marxism] is a reform and development of Hegelianism’.94 Croce’s andGentile’s Hegelian idealism is therefore the only twentieth-century ‘bourgeois’philosophy which he holds to be able to furnish a helpful conceptual contribution to thetheoretical elaboration of historical materialism. Not unlike Croce’s ‘absolutehistoricism’, indeed, ‘the philosophy of praxis has been the translation of Hegelianisminto a historicistic language’.95 And not unlike ‘actualism’, it is itself a philosophy of the‘act’—even though not of the ‘pure’, but of the ‘“impure” (impuro), real act, in the mostprofane and mundane sense of this word’.96 The possibility and necessity of an‘integration’ of historical materialism with any other contemporary philosophical-culturaltendency whatsoever is emphatically rejected by Gramsci. ‘Marxist orthodoxy’, he says,consists ‘in the fundamental concept that the philosophy of praxis is “self-sufficient”, i.e.contains in itself all the fundamental concepts needed to build up a total, integralconception of the world’.97Quite opposed to the ‘subjective’98 conception of historical materialism worked out byGramsci is the interpretation of Marx’s thought as a ‘logic of existence’, or of ‘contingentreality’, put forward by Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968).99 In his opinion, Marx’smethodology would bear a close resemblance to the ‘kind of critical instances fromwhich modem experimental science originates’.100 In open polemic against Hegelianism,and, more generally, against any ‘metaphysics’ or ‘mysticism’, the school of Della Volpe(Mario Rossi,101 Lucio Colletti,102 etc.) stresses the radical difference between thoughtand being, vindicates the ‘positive reality’, the objectivity of the ‘instance of matter, orthe manifold, or the discrete’,103 and reduces Hegel’s concept of ‘reason’ as a unity ofopposites (an ‘identità tauto-eterologica’, as Della Volpe also says) to a merely logicalideal devoid of concrete actuality.The interpretation of Marxism put forward by the ‘Milan phenomenological school’founded by Antonio Banfi (1896–1957), whose most prominent exponent was probablyEnzo Paci (1911–76), shares with Gramsci’s the insistence on the ‘subjective’,‘humanistic’ character of historical materialism, and on its consequent substantialdivergence from any kind of traditional naturalistic and deterministic materialism. But themost radical, and up-to-date, understanding of human subjectivity would certainly not bethe excessively ‘speculative’ and ‘metaphysical’ one worked out by Hegel’s philosophy,so much as the ‘descriptive’ and ‘intuitive’ explication of its ‘formal-general structures’rendered possible by Husserl’s ‘phenomenological’ method. Whereas, then, for GramsciMarxism is a ‘self-sufficient’ world-view, for Paci it needs to be ‘integrated’, and in somerespects even ‘rectified’, by the most original theoretical achievements of ‘transcendentalphenomenology’.The fundamental shortcomings of traditional idealistic philosophy, according toGramsci, consist, on the one hand, in its being an ‘abstractly’ theoretical, or‘speculative’, conception of the world which unduly ignores the essential practical, orrather ‘political’, origin and finality of any alleged ‘autonomous’ spiritual or rationalactivity; and, on the other, in its more or less explicit ‘solipsism’. ‘The history ofphilosophy’, he asserts, is nothing more than ‘the history of the attempts…to modifypractical activity as a whole’.104 ‘One can believe in solipsism, and indeed any form ofidealism necessarily falls into solipsism.’105 Gramsci therefore goes on to set against theidealistic (rationalistic) principle of ‘coherence’ as truth criterion the more triviallyquantitative one of the wideness of the consent which a philosophy (or rather, as he says,an ‘ideology’) enjoys in the ‘masses’. The truth of a philosophy, he declares, ‘iswitnessed by the fact that it is appropriated, and permanently appropriated, by themajority [gran numero], so as to become a culture’.106 ‘One can say that a philosophy’shistorical value can be “calculated” by the “practical” effectiveness it has won.’107 AlsoGramsci’s polemic against ‘vulgar’ materialism and positivism, which reduce in one wayor another humanity’s spiritual reality to the passive and ineffective ‘superstructure’ or‘epiphenomenon’ of its material life, is based, in the last analysis, on grounds that arestrictly practical-political in character. Idealistic philosophy is right to insist on the‘reality’ of ‘ideologies’—but not because they would express an ‘eternal’ or‘autonomous’ being or truth so much as because the ‘cultural factor’ would constitute anessential ‘instrument of practical action’108 in view of the establishment of the ‘politicaldomination’, of the ‘hegemony’ (egemonia),109 of one social class over another.‘According to the philosophy of praxis, ideologies are not arbitrary at all; they are realhistorical facts.’110Far more akin to traditional materialism and positivism is Della Volpe’s interpretationof historical materialism. In his opinion, Marx’s Hegel critique would have renderedpossible the foundation of philosophy ‘as a scientific ontology, this being a materialontology and no longer a formal ontology or metaphysics as the traditional one from Platoand Aristotle up to Hegel’.111 It would thus allow us to replace Hegel’s ‘metaphysics ofthe state’ with a far more realistic ‘sociology of the state’, whose peculiar inspirationwould be ‘experimental’ or ‘Galileian’.112 Its fundamental epistemological assumptionsconsist, according to Della Volpe, in the vindication of the original reality of thesensuous-contingent ‘facts’ (of the ‘manifold’) as well as of the objective validity of theprinciple of non-contradiction, of the ‘finite understanding’, of experiment, and of formalor ‘classificatory’ logic. Della Volpe decidedly denies the authentically ‘scientific’character of Engels’s ‘laws of dialectic’,113 and against any activistic or pragmatisticinterpretation of historical materialism insists on the fact that it is Marxism as a ‘science’that grounds practical activity, and not conversely.114In open polemic against ‘naturalistic’ materialism, and the very logico-experimentalmethod of the positive sciences which would be but a peculiar form of the ‘alienation’typical of ‘bourgeois’ society, Paci emphasizes no less than Gramsci the ‘subjective’,‘historical’ character of Marx’s concept of ‘matter’. Yet, unlike Gramsci, he holds that itat least virtually finds a close counterpart in Husserl’s conception of ‘transcendentalconsciousness’ as ‘virtual intentional life’ (vita intenzionale fungente), or as a ‘world-oflife’(mondo-della-vita). ‘Inert matter is in some way subjective. Materialism is not ametaphysics of a substance [sostanzialismo] alien to the subject: I am the world, I am thewhole world.’115 The plausibility of an ‘idealistic’ interpretation of such a fundamentalphenomenological conception is ineluctably undermined, according to Paci, by the factthat to Husserl consciousness is always originally and radically sensuous, passive, andtemporal, even when it is regarded as a ‘pure’ transcendental ‘function’. ‘The errorfraught with the worst consequences in the interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology isthat of those who see in [Husserl’s] Ego the consciousness or self-consciousness in thecreative [creativistico] sense of idealism.’116 The phenomenological analysis of the‘world-of-life’ would thus render it possible to ‘correct’ the erroneous ‘naturalistic’tendencies or interpretations of historical materialism without falling once again into thealleged ‘categorial’ abstractness of the ‘idealistic’ metaphysical tradition. Thephenomenological point of view, Paci maintains, ‘allows us…to stress the necessity andthe conditioning of the material structure or of the structure of the needs on humanhistoricalpraxis, but forbids us, at the same time, to apply to history a scientific dialecticin the sense in which physics is scientific’.117Except for the school of Della Volpe, then, Italian Marxism generally tends toemphasize the decisive role played by human subjectivity in the self-constructing processof history—and even of universal reality itself. Yet its uncritical allegiance to theassumption of the original reality and truth of sensible perception and praxis, of time andfinitude, as fundamental constitutive structures of ‘history’, or even of the ‘transcendentalconsciousness’, does not allow either Gramsci or Banfi and Paci to realize the‘abstractness’ (in the sense of ‘mutilated’ one-sidedness) and thus contradictoriness of a‘subjectivity’ that is not at the same time ‘objective’ (infinite), since the ‘eternal’ realityof the Absolute is not held to be immanent in it.118 Furthermore, they do not seem to besufficiently aware that their denial of the unconditional autonomy of logico-speculativereason (of the philosophical ‘categories’) in the final analysis undermines the‘coherence’, and then objective validity, of any conception or interpretation (be itphilosophical or scientific) of the very evolutionary process of human social history.EXISTENTIALISM AND EMPIRICISMThe reaction against the speculative tradition of Italian idealism does reach a climax inthe philosophical perspective of Nicola Abbagnano (1901–90) and his followers, whichhe defines in terms of both ‘positive existentialism’ and ‘methodological empiricism’ or‘neo-illuminism’. His interpretation of Heidegger’s existential ontology, indeed,emphatically disallows any possible ‘metaphysical stiffening’119 of it, and reduces themethod of ‘existential analysis’ to a mere empirical and contingent description ‘of thosehuman situations which can be regarded as “fundamental” or “essential” or “decisive” oras “limit-situations” [situazioni-limite], etc.’.120 On the other hand, as the Americanpragmatists had already pointed out, that ‘experimental method’ which any empiricistphilosophy is used to appealing to cannot and must not be conceived in a strictly‘theoretical’ or ‘objective’ sense,121 but as ‘the structure of action par excellence, in thatit is destined to modify such [human] situations’.122 This is because to Abbagnano, justas to all existentialists, the ‘being-in-the-world’ of man is a ‘relation to being’ which isoriginally ‘emotional’ and ‘practical’ in character (something like a series of ‘decisions’),and as such is absolutely alien and impenetrable to rational, theoretical consciousness.‘Existence cannot be enlightened by knowledge or by reason, but can throw light onthem.’123The originally ‘irrational’ nature of ‘existence’, according to Abbagnano, excludes thepossibility that it might be adequately qualified by those ontological categories whichmost typically express the essence of pure rationality, such as universality, necessity,infinity, ‘progress’. The only ‘really existing man’, he declares, is neither the AbsoluteSubject of the idealistic systems, nor the ideal of ‘humanity’, nor world-history, butnothing else than the ‘singular individuality’.124 This would be determined by a particularfactual ‘situation’ which radically distinguishes it from any other human individual, andwhich one-sidedly conditions any possible ‘activity’—or ‘project’—of its own. Humanexistence, then, is by its nature ‘contingent’, ‘uncertain’, ‘risky’, and the most generalontological category needed to understand its fundamental structures is therefore that of‘possibility’. Indeed, the essence of ‘freedom’ itself would turn into the mere possibilityof ‘choosing’ among a range of ‘given’ alternatives (or ‘choices’), and therefore is not,nor can it in principle ever be, infinite or absolute. ‘Existentialism asserts that man is afinite reality, that he exists and operates at his own risk and danger.’125According to Abbagnano, then, the only object of which philosophy and the sciencescan meaningfully speak is ‘finite’ (temporal, contingent, relative, etc.) reality. Thefundamental idealistic, or ‘romantic’, assumption that the finite as such is not actuallyreal, but is rather the mere manifestation of a ‘superior Reality’126 (the Totality of theUniverse, Spirit, Absolute Reason, etc.), is purely ‘mythological’ in character. But notonly is a unique, infinite Reality or Totality quite inexistent, but it does not even makesense to speak of ‘absolute’ moral, or ‘spiritual’, values. Also the faith in the objectivityof such values would be but a mere ‘romantic’ prejudice, and it is just the task of‘existential analysis’ to show its inconsistency.Romanticism always has a certain spiritualistic bent. It tends to extol theimportance of inwardness, of spirituality, as well as of the values that are called‘spiritual’, at the cost of what is earthly, material, mundane, etc. Existentialismshamelessly recognizes the importance and value for man of externality, ofmateriality, and of ‘mundanity’ in general, and thus of the conditions of humanreality that are included under these terms: the needs, the use and production ofthings, sex, etc.127[F]rom the empirical standpoint, the moral problem cannot obviously becoped with by resorting to an apology for morals, or by claiming to be able toestablish hierarchies of ‘absolute’ values, which ought to provide us withnecessary criteria for evaluation.128The fundamental philosophical error that undermines the ‘positive existentialism’ ofAbbagnano and his followers throughout is the absurd claim that the human subject maybecome ‘immediately’ aware of its own ‘existence’ as a ‘structure’ originally ‘other’ thanrational self-conscious thought. In truth, any reliance on the ‘evidence’ of ‘immediate’,sensible, ‘pre-logical’ perception, intuition, praxis, etc. is purely illusory, since it does notaccount for the intrinsically ‘mediate’ character of any subject-object relation, and,furthermore, for the fact that any ‘mediation’, connection or ‘relation’, in the lastanalysis, is nothing more (as Kant had already stressed) than a product of the ‘synthetic’activity of the pure self-conscious Ego. And even the most elementary act by which this‘posits itself necessarily involves (as the ‘dialectical’ development of its pure immanentcontent could easily show) the objective validity of those very categories of ‘necessity’,‘universality’, ‘infinity’, etc., which Abbagnano’s ‘positive existentialism’ dogmaticallydenies, or rather is simply unable to account for. In face of the luminous ‘self-evidence’of the thinking concept’s immanent self-explication, then, all the too often banal, trivial,and worn-out arguments of his polemic against ‘romanticism’ and ‘idealism’ cannot but‘dissolve as fog in the sun’.CONCLUSIONIf now, having come to the conclusion of this brief outline of twentieth-century Italianphilosophy, we take a fleeting retrospective glance at its most significant vicissitudes andachievements, we can first of all remark that the debate between the upholders and theadversaries of idealist-speculative thought does constitute the crux of its wholedevelopment. It is undeniable that in the second half of the twentieth century the anti-idealistic trends—empiricism, existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism, dualisticmetaphysics, etc.—have somehow prevailed. Yet this does not mean at all that theircontributions to the progress of Italian philosophical culture have eo ipso turned out to bemore convincing, valuable, or lasting. On the contrary, our summary analysis of theirfundamental assumptions outlined above seems to have clearly brought out theirindisputable theoretical inferiority with respect to both the content and the method of theidealistic perspective.As far as the latter is concerned, then, we have witnessed the polemic between therigorously dialectical, monistic, and ‘speculative’ development of the philosophicalprinciple of idealism carried out by Gentile’s ‘actualism’ and other antidialectical,pluralistic or historicistic forms of idealism such as Martinetti’s mystical monism,Carabellese’s ‘critical ontology’, and Croce’s ‘absolute historicism’. Despite the sharpcritiques to Gentile’s thought put forward by the latter, none of their speculativeconstructions can bear comparison—as to coherence, lucidity and intimate force ofpersuasion—with the theoretical perspective of ‘actual idealism’. Hence this is andremains up to the present the essential reference point for any further development andprogress of philosophical research in Italy.This, however, is not tantamount at all to saying that a fair evaluation of the actualspeculative achievements of Gentile’s thought cannot and must not bring to light in itmore than one fundamental limit.129 In this context I can confine myself to remarkingthat the actual result of his ‘reform of Hegelian dialectic’ appears to consist, in more thanone respect, rather in a one-sided formalistic ‘simplification’ of the very complex totalityof Hegel’s Absolute Idea than in the positive explication of a speculative truth which inthe Hegelian system would still be merely implicit. After all, Bosanquet’s famousobjection to Gentile’s philosophy—that it would be a sort of ‘narrow humanism’ which,unlike the Hegelian one, does no justice to the intrinsic ‘dialectical’ nature both of thelogical categories and of the processes of natural reality—is likely to be sound andtenable. The speculative task which the critical reflection on the theoretical limits of‘actual idealism’ proposes to contemporary philosophy thus seems to be the integration ofthe brightest and most fruitful idea of Gentile’s thought—i.e., that Absolute Reality is thetotality-in-becoming of self-conscious, active ‘spirit’—with a ‘holistic’ and ‘systematic’interpretation of the fundamental achievements of scientific and methodological researchin our century such as is being developed, for example, by the latest and most significanttrends of the philosophical tradition of Anglo-Saxon Hegelianism.130NOTES1 Cf. H.Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edn, NewYork: The Humanities Press, 1954, pp. 402–9.2 For a detailed, although somewhat uncritical, reconstruction of the ‘external’ events of thedevelopment of twentieth-century Italian philosophical culture, see E.Garin [10.31] Asummary overview of the fundamental trends of Italian thought from 1945 up to 1980 isoffered by the collection of essays, ed. E. Garin [10.53].3 M.F.Sciacca [10.86], vol. 3, p. 214.4 G.Gentile, ‘L’atto del pensare come atto puro’, 1911; in Gentile, La riforma della dialetticahegeliana [10.32], 193.5 G.Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro [10.35]; in Gentile [10.45], p. 491.6 ‘L’atto del pensare come atto puro’ [10.32], 194.7 Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro [10.35], 475.8 ‘L’atto del pensare come atto puro’ [10.32], 190.9 Ibid., p. 191.10 G.Gentile, Il modernismo e i rapporti tra religions e filosofia, 1909, ch. 10: ‘Le formeassolute dello spirito’, in Gentile, La religione, [10.38], pp. 259–65.11 Cf. G.Gentile, La filosofia dell’arte [10.42], 144–70. See also Gentile, Introduzione allafilosofia [10.43], 34–60.12 Cf. La filosofia dell’arte [10.42], 150–2.13 Cf. Teoria générale dello spirito come atto puro [10.35], 470.14 Cf. La filosofia dell’arte [10.42], 117ff.15 Cf. G.Gentile, Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere [10.36], vol. 1.16 The most developed and accomplished form of which remains, in his opinion, Catholicism:cf. G.Gentile, ‘La mia religione’ [10.40], 405–26.17 Cf., e.g., G.Gentile, Discorsi di religione [10.38], 382: ‘The most deeply religious (=mystical) element of religion is not the affirmation of the abstract object so much as thenegation of the subject’ (my italics).18 In Gentile’s terminology: in the ‘societas in interiore homine’. Cf. Gentile, I fondamentidella filosofia del diritto [10.34], 75–6; and Genesi e struttura della società [10.44], ch. 4,pp. 33–43.19 Cf. G.Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica [10.33], vol. 1, p. 25.20 For a more detailed critical examination of his fundamental logical and epistemologicaldoctrines, see my paper [10.83] and my book [10.82], part 3, ch. 2, no. 51.21 H.S.Harris [10.52], 274. A careful outline of Gentile’s philosophy is offered by the sameauthor in his essay [10.51]. Nothing more than a somewhat grotesque distortion of Gentile’sthought in a relativistic-materialistic sense is the ‘interpretation’ put forward by A.Negri inhis book [10.64] and by V.A. Bellezza in his papers [10.7] and [10.8].22 Cf., e.g., Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1970, vol. I, no. 133, Zusatz.23 G.Gentile, La riforma dell’educazione [10.41], 32–47,24 Sommario di pedagogia [10.33], 127.25 Ibid., p. 253.26 La riforma dell’educazione [10.41], 176.27 Cf. B.Croce, Logica come scienza del concetto puro [10.16], 249–54.28 Cf. B.Croce, Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia delta filosofia, [10.17],126ff.29 Cf. Logica [10.16], 91ff.30 Cf. ibid., pp. 323–5.31 Cf. Teoria e storia della storiografia [10.19], 140.32 In an essay of 1936, however, Croce, explicitly contradicting a fundamental assumption ofthe aesthetic theory outlined by him in 1902, asserts that one of the essential features of‘poetry’ is the ‘cosmicità’, i.e. its ‘universality’ (cf. B.Croce, La poesia [10.21], 11–14).33 Croce’s critical discussion and (partial) appropriation of the theory of Marx’s historicalmaterialism is documented especially by his book Materialismo storico ed economiamarxistica [10.14].34 Cf. B.Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono [10.20], 7–21.35 Cf. B.Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione [10.22], 44.36 B.Croce, Indagini sullo Hegel e schiarimenti filosofici [10.23], 29–55.37 Cf. my paper [10.81], and my book [10.82], part 3, ch. 2, no. 52.38 Cf. ibid., part 2, ch. 4, note 19, p. 280.39 Cf. U.Spirito [10.89]. For an outline of the development of Spirito’s thought see A.Negri[10.64], vol. 2, pp. 65–73.40 A.Negri [10.65], 58.41 Ibid., p. 57.42 R.Franchini [10.30], 167.43 Ibid., p. 57.44 Ibid., p. 172.45 R.Franchini [10.29], 347.46 R.Franchini [10.30], 167.47 Ibid.48 ‘Relativistic historicism’ is also the final outcome of the spiritual itinerary of one of themajor Italian historians of philosophy, Guido de Ruggiero (1888–1948). See especially[10.25]. For a critique of his misguided polemic against Hegel’s absolute idealism, which heaccuses of ‘theologism’ and even of ‘fetishism’, cf. G.Rinaldi [10.82], part 3, ch. 2, note 87.The denial of the constitutive immanence of the logical universal in individualconsciousness led Julius Evola (1898–1974) to identify the essence of the human subjectwith Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’: cf. J.Evola, Teoria dell’Individuo Assoluto [10.27].49 In fact, Franchini (not unlike, in this regard, the contemporary empiricists) denies theepistemological value of any possible logical ‘foundation’ or ‘demonstration’, as merely‘tautological’ (cf. [10.30], 171). His very denial of the possibility of metaphysics, then, is tobe held to be ungrounded—more the expression of individual subjective impotence than theascertainment of human reason’s objective, insuperable ‘limits’.50 P.Carabellese, Critica del concreto [10.11], 23. The second edition of this workconsiderably differs from the first, and can be legitimately regarded as the definitive versionof Carabellese’s ‘critical ontology’.51 Ibid., pp. 101, 184.52 And, after him, Bernardino Varisco (1850–1933), a spiritualistic and theistic Italian thinkerwho has remarkably influenced the development of Carabellese’s thought.53 In Carabellese’s ontological perspective the very concept of ‘nature’ turns out to be simplynonsensical. As a consequence, he cannot but deny in toto the theoretical value of thepositive sciences. Cf., e.g., Critica del concrete [10.11], 189.54 Ibid., p. 109.55 Ibid., p. 199.56 In more than one context Carabellese does not even hesitate to identify the objective unityof the idea of Being with God himself (cf., e.g. ibid., p. 7, note). In any case, since such anidea, as we know, is but an abstract ‘transcendental condition’ of knowing, radicallydifferent from the subject which is its other essential condition, he is bound to conclude,somewhat absurdly, that God as such does not exist actually, nor is he ‘subject’, ‘person’,‘self-consciousness’, ‘spirit’ (cf. ibid., pp. 151–2, 171, 194).57 Cf. ibid., pp. 113–15 and 181. Note the analogy of this Carabellese doctrine with Husserl’sand Heidegger’s more known ‘phenomenological’ conceptions of ‘temporality’.58 Ibid., p. 24.59 Cf. ibid., pp. 126–39.60 Garin rightly stresses the ‘obscurity’ and ‘haziness of expression’ of Carabellese’s thought(cf. [10.31], vol. 2, pp. 357, note 16, and 455). And R.Donnici suitably observes that ‘ascompared with Gentile and Croce’s idealism, his most immediate polemical targets,Carabellese’s critical ontology appears to be very frail’ (R.Donnici [10.26], 7). In myopinion, this holds good more for his critique of Gentile than for that of Croce.61 His book Kant [10.61] is devoted to a decidedly ‘spiritualistic’ interpretation of Kant’swhole ‘critical philosophy’.62 P.Martinetti, Introduzione alla metafisica [10.55], 45.63 Ibid., p. 40.64 Ibid., p. 259.65 To Spinoza’s thought, which Martinetti interprets and criticizes from a substantially neo-Platonic point of view, he devoted numerous insightful essays. Cf. P.Martinetti, ‘La dottrinadella conoscenza e del metodo nella filosofia di Spinoza’ [10.56], 289–324; ‘La dottrinadella libertà in Benedetto Spinoza’ [10.57], (reprinted in his book La libertà [10.59]); ‘Modiprimitivi e derivati, infiniti e finiti’ [10.58]; ‘Problemi religiosi nella filosofia diB.Spinoza’ [10.60]. For a general critical evaluation of Martinetti’s Spinoza interpretationsee my ‘Introduction’ to my Italian translation of E.E.Harris’s book Salvezza dalladisperazione. Rivalutazione della filosofia di Spinoza, Milano: Guerini, 1991, pp. 29–31.66 Introduzione alla metafisica [10.55], 261.67 Cf., e.g., Plotinus, Enneads VI, 9.68 Introduzione alla metafisica [10.55], 471.69 Ibid., p. 476.70 Ibid., p. 478.71 Cf. ibid., pp. 435–43.72 Ibid., p. 273.73 I say ‘relatively’, because for Martinetti their ultimate psychological origin is itself merelyempirical. They are a priori only with respect to experience’s sensible qualities, which theyunify in a ‘unique’, ‘absolute’ order. Cf. ibid., pp. 423ff.74 Cf. ibid., pp. 434–43.75 Cf. ibid., pp. 443–55.76 Ibid., p. 468.77 Ibid., p. 403. Such a vindication of the autonomy of sensible intuition seems to find a closecounterpart in Martinetti’s critique of Kant’s doctrine that the ‘manifold’ of sensuousimpressions is merely subjective, and the objective unity is introduced in it only by theunderstanding’s ‘synthetic’ activity. In his opinion, on the contrary, sense-perception is aninseparable unity of subject and object before, and independently of, its subsequentunification in the logical forms of thought (cf. ibid., pp. 241–2).78 Ibid., p. 472.79 Ibid., p. 18.80 Ibid., p. 433.81 Among the numerous, although often speculatively mediocre, writings of today’s upholdersof the metaphysics of Being, I confine myself to mentioning: F.Olgiati [10.66]; A.Carlini[10.12]; A.Guzzo [10.49]; V.La Via [10.54]; C. Mazzantini [10.63]; F.Olgiati [10.67];V.A.Padovani [10.73]; M.F.Sciacca [10.87]; L.Stefanini [10.90]; F.Olgiati [10.68];V.Mathieu [10.62]; M.F. Sciacca [10.88]; P.Prini [10.77]; G.Bontadini [10.10]; C.Arata[10.4]; C. Arata [10.5]; M.Gentile [10.46]; D.Pesce [10.76]; C.Fabro [10.28]; A.Guzzo[10.50]; L.Pareyson [10.74]. Guzzo’s broad essay [10.48] is devoted to an excellentexposition of Spinoza’s thought and to a lucid critique of it from a still ‘actualistic’ (and byno means ‘spiritualistic’ or ‘neo-Thomistic’) point of view. The reductive ‘irrationalistic’interpretation of Fichte’s thought put forward by L.Pareyson [10.75] is, on the contrary,wholly questionable.82 M.F.Sciacca [10.88], 36.83 Ibid., p. 163.84 L.Pareyson [10.74], 147.85 Cf. G.Bontadini [10.10], 4.86 M.F.Sciacca [10.88], 241.87 Ibid., p. 206.88 A.Guzzo [10.50], 77.89 A.Carlini [10.12], 192.90 F.Olgiati [10.68], 27.91 C.Arata [10.5], 18.92 M.F.Sciacca [10.88], 66–7.93 A lucid, thoroughgoing critique of Thomism from the standpoint of Gentile’s ‘actualidealism’ is carried out by Giuseppe Saitta (1881–1965) in his admirable essay [10.85].94 A.Gramsci [10.47], 115.95 Ibid., p. 244 (my italics).96 Ibid., p. 54.97 Ibid., p. 195.98 Ibid., p 238.99 G.Della Volpe [10.24], 36.100 Ibid., p. 123.101 Cf. especially M.Rossi [10.84].102 Cf. especially L.Colletti [10.13].103 G.Della Volpe [10.24], 103.104 A.Gramsci [10.47], 26.105 Ibid., p. 27.106 Ibid.107 Ibid., p. 28.108 Ibid., p. 52.109 Ibid., p. 219.110 Ibid., p. 292. For a critique of Gramsci’s Hegel interpretation see my book [10.79], vol.1,pp. 14f., 24f., 136f., 201f.111 G.Della Volpe [10.24], 169.112 Ibid., p. 121.113 Ibid., p. 201.114 Ibid., p. 184.115 E.Paci [10.71], 222.116 E.Paci [10.69], 3. For his critique of Gentile’s idealism see especially Paci [10.72]), 62–6.Husserl’s theory of consciousness’s ‘original temporality’ is developed by Paci especially inhis essay [10.70].117 [10.71], 226.118 Banfi’s open denial of the original truth and reality of the Absolute is unambiguouslywitnessed, for example, by the following passage: ‘in general one must say that according tophenomenological thought an absolute reality is as absurd as a round quadrilateral, for thereis nothing absolute but the ideal moment of pure immanence’ (A.Banfi [10.6], 94–5). For amore detailed exposition and critique at Banfi’s and Paci’s ‘phenomenological Marxism’see my book [10.78], Appendices, pp. 214–31.SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHYPrimary texts and criticism10.1 Abbagnano, N. Storia della filosofia, 3 vols, 1946; 3rd edn, Torino: UTET, 1974.10.2 Abbagnano, N. Possibilità e libertà, Torino: Taylor, 1956.10.3 Abbagnano, N. Introduzione all’esistenzialismo, 1965; 4th edn, Milano: IlSaggiatore, 1972.10.4 Arata, C. 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