by Giovanni Rota

Giovanni Gentile. La filosofia italiana tra idealismo e anti-idealismo, A cura di Piero Di Giovanni, Franco Angeli, Milano 2003 (pp. 416, € 31,00)

Giovanni Gentile: Italian philosophy between idealism and anti-idealism This book contains the proceedings of an October 2002 conference in Palermo (where Gentile got his first university job and his first school was set up). The 25 participants’ accounts are divided into five sections addressing Gentile as an historian of philosophy, the relationship between actualism and historicism, Gentile’s theory of logic, his interest in religion and folklore, art philosophy and actualistic pedagogy and studies concerning historic materialism and philosophy of law.

The interest in the social and cultural value of Gentile’s thought and politics has never faded. In just the past 15 years we have witnessed the publication of monographs by Augusto Del Noce and Gennaro Sasso, a reissued anthology of the philosopher’s writings edited by Eugenio Garin and biographies by Sergio Romano and Gabriele Turi.

For an overview one can read Girolamo Cotroneo’s article ‘Il ritorno di Gentile nella cultura italiana’, which offers a brief but thorough assessment of problems posed by some of the latest readings of Gentile and, at the same time, helps contextualize the volume’s essays on various subjects. However, Cotroneo points out that Italian culture always has avoided dealing with the theoretic crux of Gentile’s thought.

At the start, right after World War II, this was due to his politics, as if the fact that he was a fascist made it impossible to correctly interpret his philosophy. Today it cannot be said that his thought is particularly interesting from a strictly theoretical standpoint. In fact, it was grounded on a logic that, as Franco Restaino writes in ‘Gentile: una logica senza futuro’, has nothing in common with the current conception of the term or other philosophers of logic (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc.).

Restaino’s opinions are quite exacting: he calls logic a ‘leaky vessel’, ‘theoretically weak and disarming reasoning’. However, the logic Restaino calls flaccid and threadbare left a deep imprint on more than one Italian generation, representing a kind of ‘Damascus road’ for many young scholars who would contribute to Italian cultural history. Gentile’s actualism, more than Benedetto Croce’s historicism, took the shape of a real religious credo whose harmony was appraised by contemporaries in prose that may seem ponderous and rhetorical now.

But it marked Gentile’s willingness to live his own intellectual choices ‘deeply and profoundly’, as Mauro Visentin points out in ‘Sul concetto attualistico della religione’. Letters from the young Adolfo Omodeo to Gentile, discussed at length in Liliana Sammarco’s essay ‘Cultura e politica nel dialogo Gentile-Omodeo’, are exemplary. They show how Gentile’s idealism manifested as a faith that paved the way for the unheard-of potential of an active role for humanity’s will.

The relationship between Omodeo and his mentor ended around 1930; significantly, this coincided with Omodeo’s positive views of Croce’s historicism. Gentile could hardly have tolerated this; after the end of their friendship in 1925, he considered the former friend ‘as dangerous as a wild horse’. The relationship between Croce and Gentile still is one of the trickiest historical questions.

It is now well known that rather sizable differences in thinking were present right from the start of their relationship (indeed, philosophy historians now tend to avoid calling ‘Italian neo-idealism’ a single, coherent school). Yet Croce and Gentile collaborated closely during the first years of La Critica, Italy’s most ambitious 20th-century cultural undertaking.

The collaboration was only partially hobbled by the theoretical crisis expressed in 1913 and 1914 by the exchange of letters in La Voce. Later they disagreed over Gentile’s establishment of the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana in 1920 (the journal’s history is outlined by Maurizio Torrini in this volume). Croce disagreed with its specialized, philosophical and purely national bent, which was manifested right from the outset.

The leader of actualism initially showed his friend what was supposed to be the ‘bud’ of La Critica but soon became a secession. This did not prevent them from continuing to work together in substantial agreement to renew the united Italy, right up to the eve of their break-up, which coincided with the publication of the two manifestoes for and against fascism in 1925.

The issue at question - school reform – was also very tricky. The process led to the ‘most fascist reform’ (Mussolini’s public comment), debated and criticized from the start but not respected by the regime. Croce too supported reform, and both scholars realized the strategic concept of the problem. Stefano Zappoli’s report is devoted to the ‘intrinsically political’ nature of Gentile’s thought on the cardinal issue of school reform.

Despite the essay’s title, ‘Gentile e il fascismo’, it dwells particularly on the years preceding his joining fascism, which officially took place on May 31, 1923, with an open letter to Mussolini. Zappoli draws on the ideas of Gabriele Turi, an historian who made several major contributions on Gentile’s role as cultural organizer and head of the Italian Encyclopaedia, seeking to stress the intrinsically political character of the things he did in first two decades in the century.

On the other hand, the fact that Gentile developed this facet of thought prior to his fatal encounter with Il Duce appears to suggest that he moved away from fascism: the ‘true political’ Gentile, from this (debatable, in my opinion) standpoint, is ‘he who worked for the school’ (and to reform it), not ‘the partial one’. This was the Gentile ‘in continual opposition with many fascists’.

Giovanni Rota, philosophy historian