It is not necessary to be an anti-idealist to be anti-Gentilian (and anti-Crocean). It can be said that it is only through ignorance or intellectual provincialism that, from our point of view, these “philosophers” have been taken seriously and even admired. It is necessary not to have studied directly (as we have done) the great systems of German idealist philosophy, it is necessary not to have known any immanent problems that they lead, for example, beyond Hegel to the “second” Fichte and the “second” Schelling, to Schopenhauer and even to von Hartmann, in order not to take into account that Croce and Gentile are only two meagre epigones, whose sole merit is to have led the positions of absolute idealism to the absurd, all the way to an out-an-out speculative collapse.

We have given an exhaustive demonstration elsewhere. Here it will suffice to indicate summarily the central point, from which it can be seen how a coherent Gentilianism flows into a philosophy unaware of inner renunciation or fait accompli.

The starting point of idealism is constituted by the so called “critical theory of consciousness”, summarised in the rather self-evident “esse est percipi [to be is to be perceived]” of Berkeley; that is: concretely, we can speak only of the reality of what I perceive, or think about, or visualise, or, in any case that presents itself to me. The knowing and thinking subject is posited as the central reference point for every certainty. In Kant, this subject becomes the “I think” in general, in Fichte it becomes the transcendental I, and finally in Gentile it becomes the “Logos”, or “self-concept” or “pure act”. But here, a true mystification intrudes: from the rather prosaic idea that finds us enclosed in the circle of what, in one way or another, I think, experience, or suppose, then moves to the idea that the “I”, almost like a God, is the free, voluntary creator of every content of such an experience. At this point, there is the evident and astounding confusion between the “I” as simple knowing subject and the “I” as freedom and will. I can even say that the thing perceived or represented does not exist beyond the act of my perceiving it or representing it to myself (“the world” is my representation), but to say so (outside of the most confined limits of certain intellectual and cultural fields, and only in the social and historical parts) that what I perceive, I have also “posited”, freely and voluntarily – that is plainly something totally different.

Gentialianism here is getting away with the theory of the “concrete will” or of the “historicity of the spirit”, which is a veritable mystification. There is no end of things that come about, that I neither want nor desire in the least. And then? Then Gentile tells you that you do not will it as “empirical subject” and “abstract will”; instead you will it perfectly as I-as-pure-act, in whose “concrete will” and “historicity”, the real and the willed, the act and the fact, make everything one. “I” as empirical subject (or that which I truly am) should adapt myself to such a fantasised “I”. The result is this: that in order to be able to “immanentise” and bring everything that exists back to a hypothetical transcendental “I”, I am condemned to recognize as “mine” and as “willed by me” even what I want least and simply undergo.

The only ethic logically deducible from such a philosophy is the one ready to sanction every inner capitulation, every conformism, every cowardly acceptance of the fait accompli – with equal readiness, therefore, to grant the same recognition to the fait accompli of tomorrow, should it manage to overcome that of today.

Let us take a drastic example from the most prosaic domain: the Gentilian placed under torture should have to recognize that his “concrete will” is that of his tormenter, while the will that rebels and suffers would only be his empirical and “abstract” I, and only through which, can reality be different from what the will. At most, that Gentilian could console himself by thinking that it is a question of the “negative moment” posited by the same spirit (without consulting at all the concerned party) through a “sublating dialectic”. And if the “empirical subject” in such a circumstance should lose his life, equally “empirical”, his final consolation would be that immortality which, for Gentile, is reduced to subsisting in the thought of others, in a “transcendental society”, that is simply that land of mortal men.

It is futile, then, to say that deleterious consequences can follow from this amateurish philosophy of conjurers when it moves into the social and political domain.

From Ordine Nuovo I, 4-5 (July-August 1955), pp. 25-30.