Background
Giovanni was born on May 30, 1875 in Castelvetrano, Sicily.
Giovanni was born on May 30, 1875 in Castelvetrano, Sicily.
Giovanni Gentile studied at Pisa in 1893-1897, where he received a PhD 1897.
After a series of university appointments, Gentile in 1917 became professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Rome. While writing La filosofia di Marx (1899; “The Philosophy of Marx”), a Hegelian examination of Karl Marx’s philosophy, he met Benedetto Croce, and from 1903 to 1922 the two men coedited the periodical La Critica. Gentile influenced Croce’s philosophy and remained his friend until 1924, when a lasting disagreement arose over Gentile’s embrace of Fascism.
As minister of education in the Fascist government of Italy from October 1922 to July 1924, Gentile carried out wide reforms. In 1925 he served as president of two commissions on constitutional reform, thus helping to lay the foundations of the Fascist corporate state. After acting as president of the Supreme Council of Public Education (1926–28) and as a member of the Fascist Grand Council (1925–29), he saw his political influence steadily decline. Perhaps his most important achievement was the Enciclopedia Italiana (first edition completed in 1936), which he began to plan in 1925 and edited until 1943. After the fall of Benito Mussolini in 1943, Gentile supported the Fascist Social Republic established by the Germans at Salò and was made the president of the Academy of Italy, in which post he served until his death at the hands of anti-Fascist communists.
Gentile’s idealist philosophy denied the existence of individual minds and of any distinction between theory and practice, subject and object, past and present. According to him, all of these categories are merely mental constructs. Mind is the Absolute, and education is the process of revelation of the Absolute.
Gentile was highly esteemed by his students, whose views he helped to publicize through Giornale critico della filosofia italiana (“Critical Journal of Italian Philosophy”).
In addition to his editions of Italian philosophers (including Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Giambattista Vico, and Vincenzo Cuoco), Gentile wrote prolifically in education and philosophy. Among his works are Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, 4 vol. (1917–23); La riforma dell’educazione (1920; The Reform of Education); La filosofia dell’arte (1931; The Philosophy of Art); and La mia religione (1943; “My Religion”). His “actual idealism” is the subject of Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916; The Theory of Mind as Pure Act).
As a member of the Fascist Party, Gentile became a senator of the king, a member of the Fascist grand council, and a member of the committee on the reform of the constitution of the state. His Hegelian emphasis on the importance of national cultural groups and of the achievement of freedom through discipline led him to support the Fascist cause by giving it the prestige of his name and by heading numerous educational and cultural groups. During World War II his influence and prominence declined rapidly. He was killed on the streets of Florence by unknown partisans in April 1944.
Gentile propounded a system known as actual idealism, in which thought was held to be pure activity and united with action. For Gentile there was no sense in seeking the cause of experience within the content of experience, and belief in an external world was the product of our attempt to organize our experience in thought, a so-called concrete logic. Sensation was the spontaneous activity of self-affirmation and because thought had to be embodied in language, our individual self-consciousness or moral personality was united into the collective consciousness of what he called the transcendental ego or state, although perhaps it could be interpreted as culture.
In the interpretation of Harris the state here was not—though some of his wrritings might imply otherwise—necessarily the concrete state to be joyfully obeyed but more the future world of the individual’s unrealized ideals but it was at this point that Gentile became, with many of his followers, a supporter of Italian fascism and able to serve it as a Minister of Education while carrying through educational reforms in line with his ideals. Gentile was a dominating influence on Italian intellectual life even after the fall of fascism in the postwar era. He founded and edited the journal Saggi Critici and was a principal editor of the Enciclopedia Italiana.
Sources: Edwards; V. A. Bellezza (1950) Bibliografía degli Scritti di Giovanni Gentile, Florence: Sansoni. Hollhuber, I. (1969) Geschichte der Italienischen Philosophic, Munich and Basel: Reinhardt. Mittelstrass; G. M. Pozzo (1986) ‘Gentile, Giovanni', in Dizionario Critica della Letteralura Italiana, Turin: Unione Tipografica-editrice.
Giovanni Gentile was married to Erminia Nudi.