GIOVANNI GENTILE
The difference between the philosophies of the two greatest thinkers
now flourishing in Italy is due to the natures of their minds. Croce
always starts from a distinct problem, from a particular question,
and rises to speculative heights partly through the vigour of his own
genius and partly through his constant intercourse with Gentile, to
whom any particular problem always presents itself from the outset
_sub quadam specie Æternitatis_. On the other hand, Gentile starting
thus, is led to pursue his researches on the central problem into all
its particular and practical applications by a sense of reality so
strong that he has been thought to recall Thomas Aquinas, by his vast
erudition not only in the history of philosophy, but in the whole
historical world. Yet, even apart from this, and from his special
interest in all the problems of Law and pedagogy, the influence of
Benedetto Croce always compels Gentile to keep in touch with actual
reality. Their mutual criticism is perhaps the best example in
philosophical history of the creative power of the critic. For except
in one instance—where Croce insists upon seeing in his friend’s Actual
Idealism the latest form of mysticism—the critic is always continuing
the work which he is engaged in reviewing and revealing to the author
the germs of truth that lie as yet undeveloped in his theory.
The import of Croce’s work is certainly more easily grasped than
Gentile’s ideas as they present themselves in his theoretical world.
Many Italians are acting on these ideas of Gentile’s who would be
unable to formulate them; and that is the most remarkable thing
about them. He became a professor at the age of twenty-one, exactly
thirty years ago, and as Professor Wildon Carr truly says in his
introduction to his own translation of Gentile’s Pure Act—which will
be here constantly quoted—he has become famous not only on account of
his historical and philosophical writings, but also by the number and
fervour of the disciples he has attracted. A born teacher, he loves
teaching, and in teaching has acquired much of his knowledge of mind.
He never divorces theory from the concrete ground of life; and when
he addresses people between 17 and 60 years of age he is constantly
forcing them to test in their own actual life the truth of what he is
saying.
He strongly dislikes the taking of notes; for he does not want the
students to repeat his own words on the day of their examination.
The lectures are only meant to help them to take their bearings,
to enlighten them; they must read their set books by themselves
and interpret them by their own wits. His words must be taken as
an invitation to think out their own problems for themselves; he
wants to spur them on, not to solve problems for them. Thousands of
schoolmasters are actually following his pedagogy which so perfectly
meets the requirements of the present generation, that it is admirably
acted upon in the remotest villages and by people whose philosophy is
that of commonsense and good-will. Gentile has produced not only a
system of philosophy, but determined a current of spiritual life which
partakes both of theory and practice—blending them perfectly.
Just as Bruno, Bacon and Descartes opened the era of subjectivism,
individualism and liberty, so now Gentile opens a new era which is a
synthesis of law and liberty since he postulates the individual as the
relation of the empirical self to the transcendental self, since his
subjectivism becomes concrete and capable of realising the object. This
sounds somewhat abstruse and a few illustrations of the point at issue
may be useful.
Fuel is not fire, and in order to warm myself, fire is the thing I
need. But the fuel is necessary to the fire. The fire, indeed, _is_
only so far as it consumes the fuel. Both are necessary; yet it is
the fire which makes the fuel; since the coal, wood, or charcoal is
fuel merely because the fire can destroy it as such. But the fire does
not exist before it starts to consume the fuel. Now in knowledge the
thing man knows is not knowing, it is known; therefore, the principle
of knowledge is man. But can man know, in the absence of that which
he knows? Obviously not. Shall we then go back to the old dualism and
take man and the world, the subject and the object, as standing in
opposition again? No; a thing is an object of knowledge because the
subject postulates it as such and is therefore only in the act by which
the subject knows it. The one single source of _spiritual_ reality is
man; but he realises the world only in so far as he realises himself as
a knowing subject. And just as fire is fire as long as it destroys the
fuel; so man is really man, a spiritual being, a subject as long as he
acts as such. The point is often explained by practical illustration to
quite tiny children, to whom no one would try to state it, as I have
just done, theoretically.
Master: Why do you come to school?
Pupil: Because my mother sent me (—or—to learn to read and write.)
Master: If you come because your mother sent you, that is quite
right; but until you see for yourself why you should come to
school, you will get very little good out of it.
Pupil: But since I have got to come, I want to learn.
Master: And what do you suppose all the others come for?
Pupil: Why, sir, to learn.
Master: And tell me, what must I do if you are all to learn?
Pupil: I suppose you must teach us.
Master: Well now, what is a school?
Pupil: This is a school.
Master: You mean the building?
Pupil: Yes, of course.
Master: Don’t you think I could teach and you could learn in a
field?
Pupil: Well, I suppose we could.
Master: Would that be a school? (No answer). It would. You see the
building and the writing over the door have nothing to do with it.
_We_ make the school. For if to-morrow the authorities were to send
us to a barn and put some poor people here——
Pupil (interrupting): Sir, I know, it would be a poorhouse.
Master: And the barn where we went?
Pupil: It would be the school.
Master: Right. Then who makes the school?
Pupil: The teacher and the pupils.
Master: Right. But let us go on talking about the same case. The
authorities say that this place must be given up to house poor old
people. Now I think that a lot of strong boys like you could carry
the benches, blackboard and so on to the barn.
Pupil: Of course we could.
Master: And I might say to you: “Come this afternoon, all of you,
and let us do it.”
Pupil: Very well, we would come, at least those who live near.
Master: And we would start teacher and pupils together, carrying
the things.
Pupil: Yes, sir.
Master: Would that be a school?
Pupil: Of course not, sir.
Master: Then it is not enough to have pupils and teacher together
to make a school.
Pupil: No, sir.
Master: What is missing, then?
Pupil: Why, sir, we carry benches and things, and that is not a
school.
Master: Well, what exactly is a school?
Pupil: ... I don’t know.
Master: I’ll tell you. It is my teaching and your learning that
makes a school. Do you see?
Pupil: Oh, yes.
Master: But if it is actual teaching and learning that make a
school, what happens if the master is a bad master and does not
actually teach anything?
Pupil: Well ... I suppose it is not a real school ...
Master: It is not a school at all.
Pupil: I see.
Master: Now if a boy does not want to learn at all——
Pupil: He is a bad pupil.
Master: He is not a pupil at all, as long as he persists in not
learning.
Pupil: Of course he is not.
Master: And if he makes a noise and prevents the others from
learning, what then?
Pupil: He oughtn’t, sir.
Master: I know he oughtn’t. But if he does not see that he
oughtn’t, and goes on doing it, what happens?
Pupil: He prevents the others from learning and the master from
teaching.
Master: Very good, and what is the result for the school, if, as
you see, it is the actual teaching and learning which makes the
school?
Pupil: It is just as before, when the Master was bad, it stops
being a school.
Master: Now supposing you didn’t mind being punished rather than
keep still, could you start singing or jumping about just to be
funny?
Pupil: Well, no, not even if I did not mind being sent out, I
couldn’t.
Master: Do you know why?
Pupil: Because I should spoil your teaching and their learning.
Master: And you would destroy the school.
In such a discussion, which may occupy several days or weeks, the child
has obviously learnt some rules of life derived from highly speculative
notions. The reality of any relation depends on two acts directed
towards a common aim; therefore, the rights of the two parties are
dependent upon their actual efficiency in the pursuit of the common
aim. A master who does not teach must be dismissed; a pupil who does
not learn loses the right of being a pupil. Similarly, if a landowner
allows the ground to lie waste, he is not discharging his duties as a
landowner and his rights to his property are not actual. This stands
in complete contrast with the “Rights of Man” which could assert man’s
liberty to use his property as he chose, the state only calling upon
its citizens to pay taxes—and fight in war, because the state was
understood as something external to the citizens. The relation between
employer and employed is clearly parallel to that between master and
pupil; in it the common aim is to realise as much profit as possible
out of the enterprise. As soon as one of the parties diminishes the
productivity of the enterprise, he forfeits his right to damage
himself, the other party and the commonwealth. The state, though having
no direct shares in the profit is enriched or impoverished according to
the increased or decreased productivity of private enterprises.
In this is stated for the first time since Christ preached and lived
the Gospel, the true equality of men that had been asserted in it. So
thoroughly does Christianity realise that rights are correlative to
duties, that before spiritual citizenship can be bestowed on a child
in most Christian churches sponsors are required to take a pledge in
its name, and upon its coming to adult state the young Christian must
confirm that pledge and acknowledge the duties on which its rights
depend.[10] This is the reason why the Roman Catholic Church is at once
democratic and hierarchical. A shepherd can become Pope, an Emperor
can be deprived of his spiritual citizenship. The view of citizenship
as a birthright is a relic of Paganism when slavery might be the
predestined fate of some and citizenship of others. Political reality
finally becomes spiritual reality; man is a citizen exactly in so far
as he realises the state, through the act of consciousness by which,
transcending the empirical element in his own will, he postulates such
a will in religious objectivity, thereby making it law.
The little boy, in realising that his purpose in going to school is
to learn, transcends everything in his will that is merely individual
or private. His will ceases to be subjective, it becomes greater than
the little boy, it becomes school life, it becomes objective and
transcending the little boy, it is to him _Law_ in all the majesty and
imperativeness of the term. Again, boys become members of a football
team because they want to play and eventually win matches. They want
this freely and this choice, together with their individual skill in
the game, produces the team as a unit for the purposes of play. But
the team once formed, the captain chosen for his fitness to command
the team in such a way as to increase its efficiency, and each member
called to perform the part in which he can best serve the team’s
interest, the act of will by which each member in perfect liberty wants
to win a match transcends itself, become the team’s will, and as such,
objective, sacred, inviolable law. The instances in which members of a
team, disregarding the orders of the captain (in whom the eleven wills
in all their liberty fuse into one and become law), play to show off
their personal skill illustrate clearly enough by their effect on the
score, the inviolableness of such collective will.
To realise the full force of this relation between liberty and law, the
state and the citizen, is not easy, if one looks for it exclusively
in Gentile’s philosophy of law; but his pedagogy makes it far easier
and his lectures perfectly easy. There is something religious about it
which pervades the whole of his philosophy as it pervades Fascism.
The child is brought to realise what he is by looking at the various
societies which co-operate in making him what he is. Being asked what
he would say, If somebody meeting him in America asked him what he
was and who he was, what would he say? He usually answers to such a
question that he would say: “I am so-and-so,” but he is then asked:
“What does that mean?” which brings the child to realise that the
meaning of his name is that he is the son of his father and mother,
he is what he is first of all as belonging to his particular family.
Again: “I am so-and-so” conveys but little to a perfect stranger. What
would he say next. “I am an Italian.” Very well, and “what kind of
man in Italy?”... The child here usually pauses in great perplexity.
It takes some time before he comes to speak of a possible profession
and of his religion; and for this last point it is necessary to point
out to him that there are several religions. Once he has got there,
however, he realises so fully all that is implied in this kind of
definition that one can hardly help being astonished by the readiness
with which children or older boys work out Gentile’s ideas. The author
has had the opportunity of noting how easily children grasped the true
nature of their relation to family, country, religion, and school, and
the fact that what they were depended on their consciousness of being
a living member of such societies. The child thus acquires a religious
attitude towards them. He realises the sacred character of the family,
as based solely upon his own moral realisation of his relation to the
members of his family. The family blood running in his veins, he is
told has nothing to do with that relation. His father is his father in
the spiritual way which alone binds them together, because he calls
him his son and acknowledges paternal relationship to him with all the
duties and claims that it involves. Gradually he comes to realise that
he draws all his importance—his reality—from his conscious relation
to the societies to which he belongs and which together make up the
not-self; and that such societies are merely the various consciousness
of single members transcending their poor, limited, empirical
little selves and calling into existence their better and greater,
transcendental selves. Man as a thing-in-itself is nowhere to be found;
mankind vanishes like a phantom as soon as you try to meet it. If every
man and boy in the world discharged his duty as a member of a family,
of a school, of a club, of a calling, and finally of a church and of a
state, mankind would certainly know peace and well-being, for man then
would consider his relations, school, club and trade fellows, religious
brethren and fellow citizens as belonging to his own self. But no man
can do so perfectly, and it is as much as can be expected from him if
he does what, in the sincerity of his soul, he knows to be the very
best he can do and loves his neighbour merely so far as he realises
him to be part of his greater self. The speculative ground of such a
conception of life must be briefly stated before coming to the idea of
Liberty and Law, and to that of citizen and state.
Spiritual reality is not Mind plus some spiritual fact; it is purely
and simply Mind as subject, since any spiritual fact must be resolved
in the real activity of the subject, who knows it. Common language
expresses this by saying that to know something thoroughly we must
make it our own. Strictly speaking we know no others. If we know them
and speak of them they must be within us. To know is to identify, to
overcome otherness as such. As long as we feel ourselves confronted
by the spiritual existence of others as different from ourselves,
something from which we must distinguish ourselves, something which we
presuppose as having been in existence before our birth, it is merely a
sign that we are not yet realising the spirituality of their existence.
To us they are still nature.
This doctrine would be absurd if it were not considered in the light
of Gentile’s notion of the transcendental and empirical selves, both
meeting in man, as a concrete person in whom the infinity of the
transcendental individualises itself through the finiteness of the
empirical. The transcendental ego being one and the empirical egos
being multiplicity itself, it is obvious that the _differences_ are
as necessary to the identity as the fuel to the fire. It is, indeed,
through the process of transcending empirical differences that man
asserts the transcendental character of mind.
Obviously all the difficulties of moral problems arise from an
empirical conception of man and his relations to others. Empirically I
am an individual, and as such in opposition not only to all material
things, but equally to all the individuals to whom I assign a spiritual
value, since all objects of experience, whatever their value, are not
only distinct but separate from one another in such a way that each, by
its own particularity absolutely excludes from itself all the rest. All
moral problems arise from experience and arise precisely because of
the absolute opposition in which the ego, empirically conceived, stands
to other persons tormented by the supreme moral aspiration of our being
that longs for a harmony in which we should become one with all others
and with the whole world. This means that moral problems arise in so
far as we become aware of the unreality of our being, as an empirical
ego, opposed to other persons and surrounding things, and in so far as
we come to see that our own life is actualised in the things opposed
to it. But though this is the situation in which moral problems arise,
they are solved only when man comes to feel another’s needs as his own,
and thereby finds that his own life means that he is not closed within
the narrow circle of his empirical personality, but is ever expanding
in the activity of a mind superior to all particular interests and
yet immanent in the very core of his personality. It must never be
forgotten, however, that the reality of the transcendental ego, far
from destroying the empirical ego, implies it.
Passing to the essential characteristics of what might be opposed
as spiritual to what is natural, we find Gentile working out the
distinction from the fact that anything natural, such as a stone,
_is_ whilst anything spiritual, mind, a work of mind, a political
constitution _becomes_. Mind and being are opposite terms. A plant
_is_, an animal _is_, in so far as all the determinations of the plant
or animal are a necessary and _pre-ordained consequence_ of its nature.
All the manifestations by which their nature is expressed are already
there, existing implicitly. The empirical manifestations of their
being come to be conceived, therefore, as closed within limits already
prescribed as impassable boundaries. In the natural world everything
is pre-ordained according to the law of Nature, or, to use Gentile’s
own words, everything _is by Nature_. In the spiritual world nothing
_is by Nature_, but it becomes what it becomes through the activity
of mind. Nothing is ever ready-made; nothing can be finished and
complete. The social position of a family, the political system of a
country can never be settled once for all; the members of the former
and the citizens of the latter must go on creating it day by day and
hour by hour. So is it with moral life. All the noblest achievements
of the past do not diminish one whit the sum of duties still to be
performed. The minute man stops realising in the inmost recesses of
his consciousness what he must do for his family, for his country, or
even for the firm to which he belongs, the family will be decadent,
the country will begin to lose what his predecessors had painfully
won, the firm will feel the incipient decay of a credit acquired
through work and sacrifice. Nothing is ever done once for all; morally,
intellectually, politically, socially, economically, everything is
always to be done.
A hard gospel to preach when man is accustomed as he is now to hear
only the proclamation of his rights. Sacrifice, self-denial is here
pointed out as the way to greater conquests and to the assertion of
a nobler and more powerful self. To find spiritual reality man must
seek it and, seeking it, create it. This means that it never confronts
him as an external reality. If man wants to find it he must work to
realise it. So long as it is sought it is found, so long as it is being
conquered or constructed it is to be found, so long but no longer.
Empires show signs of incipient decay the moment the Empire builders
stop building them, stop wanting to build them. Yet from this austere
conception of life springs a beautiful notion of liberty, a splendid
conception of man’s creativity.
Gentile has had the courage to study closely, very closely, the old
scholastic Doctors, thereby acquiring a deep and almost unerring sense
of Christianity; whilst his familiarity with the problems of law and
the works of the Humanists and the Renaissance, have marked him with
characteristics that sometimes cause his hearers to hail in him a
Father of the Church. All this notwithstanding there are many points of
doctrine upon which he stands in contrast with the theologians.
* * * * *
Where Gentile speaks of thinking he invariably refers both to the
act of the will and to the act of the intellect; for he considers
their distinction as having been abolished when through the work of
modern psychology the very notion of a multiplicity of faculties was
rejected. The mind is not now intellect and now will; but is known now
as intellect and now as will. It should be observed, however, that
the creative will does not create a world that issues from it and
exists independently of it; it is self-creative just as any judgment
is first of all self-assertive. No act of man’s will is ever directed
to something already realised; man always wants to do an action. For
instance, wanting a new pair of shoes merely means wanting to buy, to
have, to get, a new pair of shoes; and since we have seen that any
action is self-assertion, man in any act of will is wanting to realise
his own self. In consequence of the unity existing between him and the
world, man’s purpose is never external to him. Man realising his own
self: such is the nature of mind, dynamic and dialectic at once.
This notion of dialectic enables us to meet law and liberty on their
common ground, morality; spiritual reality is endowed with a life that
is best called dialectic, inasmuch as it is never either completely
positive or purely negative. Anything spiritual from the most intimate
religious experience, down to any political form, family arrangement,
or business establishment _is_ so long as, not yet being, it strives
to realise, to assert, to establish itself. Anything spiritual let
us say, human, the moment it _is_, that is to say the moment it is
accomplished, the moment it ceases to develop or establish itself, is
dead or dying. Gentile uses even stronger language: he says outright,
_as a reality it is absolutely_ annihilated.
For him, as for Kant, the law of man’s will is the end that determines
each act of will; since to be moral the will must have in itself
its own law and its own end. The word moral can here have but one
equivalent, namely, spiritual, that is to say _possessing value_.
Morality so understood is an attribute of the entire life of mind,
which must have an absolute value—be it truth, beauty, or goodness—such
value being meaningless if it does not correspond to an ought to be,
imperative _hic et nunc_ as a consequence of liberty. Moreover, this
binding imperativeness is universal—for imperative means necessary, and
there can be no necessity without universality.
The good is, in conclusion, the value of man’s spirit in its
dialectical actuality; it may be termed the most concrete form of
spiritual reality. Any spiritual act is moral in so far as it is mind’s
realisation; consequently the negation of morality cannot be understood
without understanding this realisation, which is the spiritual process
or development of mind as society. The good is development; and as
such it implies evil as its negativity.[11] Light and shadow, good
and evil; in both cases the second term is the negative of the first.
And herein lies all the tragedy of mind. Spiritual life is a complex
of light and shadow, a constant struggle of the particular with the
universal. Negativity opposes itself to positivity, evil to good, as
the _particular_ to the universal. Yet it is through their conflict and
opposition that spiritual life realises itself, and this realisation is
entrusted to the individual, who in and through his very particularity
is the agent of the universal will.
Obviously, if we take man, the individual man, in his pure
empiricalness, he can do nothing without superhuman help. But this
notion of man, which is the ground of all the abstract forms of
egoism, individualism and anarchy, is a mere fancy. No single man can
so be deprived of the divine light of intelligence as not to know
of his own existence as a person, as a self, and in the very act
of knowing himself as such to assert what is universal in him. Man
in short is universal in so far as he does not belong to nature, a
pure object of knowledge, but is a subject. So that his moral law is
nothing superadded to him _ab extra_, it is the life granted to him by
Providence realising itself.
This is a far cry from ordinary selfishness. From this point of view
the _bellum omnium contra omnes_ appears as the materialistic fancy of
a man whose idea of the world was inferred from the idea of the body.
Man’s body is in fact one among many. But man’s will in his opposition
to other wills reveals his universality. That opposition which had
been taken as proof of the plurality and radical particularity of
subjective will is insisted upon by Gentile as a proof of the unity and
radical universality of such will. Men’s wills collide with each other,
it is true, but they do so in the very attempt to enforce the claims
of that in them which is universal. For will has not realised itself
as long as it stands as one will face to face with another will or so
many other wills. In such a position it appears as one among many, as
accidental and particular, as having a law differing from that of the
others; whereas it always claims to be Will, against which there can be
no other will—experience shows us daily that nothing can be done when
diverging wills are exerting themselves—and such is the characteristic
of the moral will.
The statement of this problem, the moral problem, is very difficult
indeed, and from a misrepresentation of the relations between _my_
will and _your_ will and _his_ will, arise conflict and war; but our
conception of war is not complete if we consider it apart from the
conception of peace. War is nothing but the realisation of peace, which
is the reconciliation of a duality or plurality of wills in the Will.
This is why war exists and why there are private interests conflicting
in the plurality of wills. Such war and conflict, however, are due
to the particularity of the wills and last as long as each of these
wills insists on realising itself as universal, ceasing when they
compose their differences and accept as the common will that which
has manifested its universality through the conflict. A peace without
war cannot be conceived, since peace is the life of will and will
cannot live but in a self-assertion which is nothing but the eternal
resolution of the conflict through which it comes into being. Thus will
is, and ever must be, _concordia discors_.
Whatever the social unit taken as an example—family, school, state,
church—the reality of it is always in development and is intelligible
only as a process. It never _is_, and always is, but only in so far
as it realises itself in perfect liberty. This free realisation does
not permit of the separation of its negativity from its positivity.
In such a way, though realising itself as universal, the family or
state can be thought of as a spiritual reality only in so far as it
contains the particular element which offers an endless resistance to
the process of universalisation. A society that perfectly unifies its
spiritual diversity, abolishing every sign of variety, has inevitably
gone to pieces since it loses all the spiritual forces that made it
alive. Gentile goes so far as to say that in fact it is already dead.
It is the eternally recurring opposition of interests and wills that
permits the dialectic and dynamic unity of life to pulsate in any
social constitution. Consequently the particularity of the will—to be
resolved in the universal—consists in its negativity, without which the
assertion of the universal could not exist as an act, for it would be a
mere fact, not something due to the act of man but just something which
_is_ by nature.
There is no assertion of will which is not exclusion, suppression
of its own negation. Thus society is empirically the agreement of
individuals, and speculatively the realisation of will through an
eternal process. Universal value is thereby identified as a process
realising itself through the suppression of what is particular and
negative. Society is not _inter homines_, but _in interiore homine_ and
it can exist between men inasmuch as all men are spiritually one man,
with one single interest: the eternal _increment_ of the patrimony of
mankind.
Now _society_ implies _authority_, a superior will imposed on the
associated wills to unite them under a common law. Rousseau had
conceived the state, the people as a passive body, reserving activity
for the sovereign. Gentile having raised to speculative form the
brilliant intuition that lies in the Contract, after having fully
recognised it as Rousseau’s idea, now rejects his conception of the
distinction between sovereign and subjects. What he actually denies is
the passivity ascribed to the people, and the school is, as usual, the
experimental ground of his notion.
School is a form of spiritual association implying a teacher, lawgiver
to his pupils. It is not the teacher, however that, through his
authority, brings the pupils to accept truth; on the contrary it is
truth that confers authority on the teacher. The _Ipse dixit_ implies
a great knowledge of the master’s familiarity with science. Whatever
the ground on which we acknowledge an authority, the authority is such
as a consequence of our _acknowledging_ it; and all the theories and
inquiries concerning the source of a higher authority are to Gentile
vain prattling. For him it is quite obvious that, however high such an
authority may be it will never be higher than the height to which it
has been raised by the people subject to it. Through this agency and
this agency alone authority _becomes_ law.
Authority is invested in the spiritual self, the universal person,
ultimately the only sovereign. This transcendental self is the
transcendental law of which we have spoken as moral law, the
transcendental sovereign which has brought Gentile to reject Rousseau’s
distinction between passive citizenship and active sovereignty because
it throbs in every man’s breast and is the one law and sovereign that
can impose laws and make them acknowledged.
* * * * *
It is now easy to realise that, although Gentile was first known as
a Hegelian, by the time he wrote his philosophy of law he had fully
developed the more realistic tendencies of his Idealism which link him
to Thomas Aquinas, Kant and above all to Vico. The real difference
between Gentile’s notion of political reality and that of Hegel—the
likeness is too obvious to require pointing out—is a consequence of
their different ways of working out their respective notions of reality.
In spite of his brilliant conception of dialectic Hegel’s intuition
of Reality is not dialectical but intellectualistic, and therefore
static. He realised that we do not conceive reality dialectically
unless we conceive it as itself thought. But he distinguished the
intellect which conceives things from the reason which conceives mind
and his dialectic was in consequence a dialectic of thought, thought
however being understood as the result of the act of thinking. Whereas
to have a real dialectic, corresponding to the throbbing reality of
life, what is wanted is a dialectic of thought, understood as the act
of thinking. What has already been thought is as static as a stone.
Hence the necessity in which Hegel found himself of separating thought
and action, which led him to declare in the introduction to his
philosophy of Right that Philosophy was a twilight bird, whose activity
began at dusk when the day’s work was done. For Hegel a law in order
to be imperative must be pronounced by something that is already in
existence. But Reality in existence is nature. Hegel’s state belonging
thus to static reality, being a fact, not an act, the citizen is
nothing in himself; all his reality come to him from the state. This
does not mean that he is annihilated (both in Imperialism and Communism
he is very highly cultivated), but is as the little wheel of a huge
engine which is carefully oiled so that the machine may go the better
for it. His end is the state’s end.
Not so with Gentile. Reality, being really dialectical does not admit
of a distinction between will and intellect. You do not act and then
think about it. For life, natural or spiritual, is the reality: if
theory, the activity of the intellect, is merely a contemplation of
it, such theory is not even real. How can one think of something added
to the real world? What could such an addition be? There is no way of
conceiving knowledge except as a creation of the spiritual reality
which is itself knowledge. If Reality is spiritual, in realising
itself it creates both the will and the intellect. It is only through
the empirical consideration of their manifestations that they can be
distinguished; speculatively they are one and the same thing.
The difference between the idea of a good action and a good action
itself is a difference between two ideas. In the first case we mean the
idea which is a content or abstract result of thought, but not the act
by which we think it, and in which its concrete reality truly lies. And
in the second we mean the idea, not as an object or content of thought,
but as the act which realises a spiritual reality.
The state can not be a fact, something already realised. It is the
eternal process, the _instauratio regnum boni_ always becoming, and
dying to be realised by the consciousness of the individual in its own
process of self-realisation. The state is indeed the moral reality of
the individual, who to become a citizen realises himself transcending
his empirical subjectivity. The state exists only in the hearts of
men; it is the intellectual and practical activity of men realising
themselves as spiritual reality. It is always being altered through
the positive and negative manifestation of man’s moral will. Man is
not and cannot be subject to the state, except in so far and in so far
only as he is its creator. And creation means liberty no less than
self-realisation means realisation of the not-self and therefore the
law.