Actual Idealism
Actual Idealism was a form of idealism developed by Giovanni Gentile that grew into a 'grounded' idealism contrasting the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the Absolute Idealism of Georg Hegel. It was successful in laying a theory of regarding thought that garnered enough attention to prove a competition to the new waves of positivism and therefore materialist conceptions of social life that were vying for reformist tendencies in the politics of the time. It's ideas therefore were key to helping the Fascist party consolidate power in Italy with it's own reform, and integral to giving Fascism the content of it's revolution sentiment.
Actual Idealism holds that; It is the act of thinking as percipience, not creative thought as imagination, which defines reality. Therefore one idea or another can only be a formulation of particulars within the bounds of a known totality that one idea is not on any side of those particulars. Totality constituting the whole cohesive reality, is negated in such idea by itself. Integration of totality against idea in appealing to oneself is the sole fruitful means of idea, which poses no favoritism to the developed ideas giving a knowing precedence to the world it has created itself into. Anything less is a presupposition and therefore innately unreal. This totality is the act of thinking, not thoughts so regarded by thinking.
While realists agree the world known to them is the only one they possibly know 'as a static concept,' they continue to regard something real about the concept having nothing to do with their thinking. Actual Idealists disregard the static concept as totally false in regard to the world for them where the only real is in 'the act of thinking' within being.
Actual Idealism therefore rejects the Hegelian 'Absolute' as being a presupposition unprovable to the mind, unless considered to be synonymous with what's known or the totality of the act of thinking. Which therein would put the dialectical processes making 'self' & 'not self' a consideration proving external existence real insofar as it's in reality part of the self's own thinking. Being that the self regarded alone is always a concept and cannot be given reality as such. Neither does Actual Idealism admit archetypal concepts in that possible conception of them in relation to all else gives them no reality. Gentile made a pivotal distinction to factors concerning Idealism's own criteria for reality which have stood since Berkeley's adage "Esse est percepi" by distingushing between "pensiero pensante" the 'act of thinking', and the 'static thought' "pensiero pensato".
Therefore thinking is an active process and the static conception of a thought is it's opposite. Where thinking is the vitality of psychological being, a thought is opposed to that vitality and therefore would be opposed to that immanent quality where alone existence takes on it's reality to the Actual Idealist. No sense or imagining of something beyond or external to the act of thinking in itself for the thinker can be real, and therefore cannot be said to exist, even if, to continue the act of thinking it must be said that it does exist as a creation of the act of thinking if even then it remains unreal. Which in considering it the measure of it's existence is realized for then it is exposed to the act of thinking and is subject to reality; From an 'a priori' beginning to a non-empirical conclusion without presupposition.
Further reading in English on Actual Idealism
- 'The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile' (Roger W. Holmes, Macimllan, 1937)
- 'The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile: An Inquiry into Gentile's Conception of Experience' (Pasquale Romanelli, Birnbaum, 1937)
- 'The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile' (H. S. Harris, University of Illinois Press, 1960)
- 'Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism' (A. James Gregor, Transaction Publishers, 2001)
Further reading in German
- 'Der aktuale Idealismus' (Giovanni Gentile, Mohr Siebeck, 1931)
- 'Die Staatsphilosophie Giovanni Gentiles und die Versuche ihrer Verwirklichung im faschistischen Italien' (Sebastian Schattenfroh, Lang, Peter, GmbH, Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1999)
