My Adaptation of Giovanni Gentile’s “Conceivability Argument” for Idealism

P1) No actual, concrete being is conceivable otherwise than as an actual, concrete unity of meaning.

“Reality is conceivable only insofar as the reality conceived is conceived as being in relation to the activity of a Mind which conceives it, and in that relation it is not only a possible object of knowledge, but a present and actual one. To conceive a reality is to conceive, at the same time and as one with it, a Mind in and for which said reality manifests itself; and therefore the concept of a material reality is absurd....The concept of bodies existing generally outside all Mind, is a self-contradictory concept, since we can only meaningfully speak of things that are either objects of knowledge, or things that are conceived as objects of knowledge; and objects of knowledge are manifestations-to-and-for-Mind; they are ideas....The object, even when thought of as outside all Mind, is always mental….When we believe that we are actually conceiving a reality outside all Mind, we falsify our belief by conceiving of said reality as something which retains its meaning and sense in the absence of all Mind; for, even then, Mind is intervening and powerless to abstain from intervening, in the very act by which we affirm Mind’s absence.” (Gentile, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 1-4) [Translated by me] 

“For everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of issuing forth from it. We say that the brain is external to consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is enveloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with beautiful plants and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to which for a moment we supposed them to be external. We may start thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought; and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: “Here my thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought”? Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it thinks it as mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never really stops. Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it universal. At every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. In this life, such as we see it from the interior when we do not fantastically materialize it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is infinite.” (Gentile, The Reform of Education, 56-57) 

“We give the name of realism to that manner of thinking which makes all reality consist in an external existence, abstract and separate from thought, and makes real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas to external things. By idealism on the other hand we mean that higher point of view from which we discover the impossibility of conceiving a reality which is not the reality of thought itself. For it, reality is not the idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can exist outside of the mind, and must exist there in order that the mind may eventually have the means of thinking it. Reality is this very thought itself by which we think all things, and which surely must be something if by means of it we want somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will not entangle itself in the enchanted web of dreams, but will instead give us the life of the real world. If it is not conceivable that such activity could ever go forth from itself and penetrate the presumably existent world of matter, then it means that it has no need of issuing from itself, in order to come in contact with real existence; it means that the reality which we call material and assume to be external to thought is in some way illusory; and that the true reality is that which is being realised by the activity of thought itself. For there is no way of thinking any reality except by setting thought as the basis of it.” (Gentile, The Reform of Education, 75)

“When Being is conceived as external to the human mind, and knowledge as separable from its object, so that the object could be without being known, it is evident that the existence of the object becomes a datum, something, as it were, place before the mind, something given to the mind, extraneous to it, and which the mind would never make its own did it not, summoning force encourage, swallow the bitter morsel by an irrational act of faith.  And yet all philosophy, as we go on unfolding it, shows that there is nothing outside mind, and there are therefore no data confronting it.  The very conceptions we form of this something, which is external, mechanical natural, show themselves to be not conceptions of data which already are external but data furnished to mind by itself.  Mind fashions this so-called external something because it enjoys fashioning it, and escapes by re-annulling it when it has no more joy in it.  Moreover, no one has yet found it possible to discover throughout the whole range of mind the mysterious and unqualifiable  faculty it requires,—faith.  It would have to be an intuition of the universal, or a though of the universal without the logical process of thought.  What is called an act of faith has been shown time and again to be an act of knowledge or an act of will, a theoretical or a practical form of mind.” (Croce, Logica, 120)

“There is no possible form of being which we can form a conception such that we can form a conception of its being actualized in some manner which is definitely non-psychical.  That is, with every possible form of being, though we may conceive it as actualized, without bringing its being experienced or otherwise into question, wherever we raise this question and try to conceive it either as actualized in a whole, or as a whole...which is experienced, or as actualized in detachment from any such whole...we find we can form a conception only of the first.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 127)

“[W]e can only think an object existing independently of our consciousness by thinking it as it would be if it were present to a mind. For example, if we are really to understand what is meant by talking of the state of the earth prior to man we must imagine some mind as contemplating it at the time…and think it as it would have been for that mind. We can make correct verbal statements about it without doing this, but this is the only way in which we can picture to ourselves what the statements really mean. Similarly, I can only realize other facts by picturing them as they would be for a knowing mind. It may even be contended that the only way in which I can think an a priori universal truth to be necessarily valid is by thinking it as such that any mind must necessarily accept it as true if he understands it.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 21) 

“Now we have already found an idealistic element in knowledge in the fact that in order to determine what something is we must first think what it would be for a mind fully and discriminately aware of it….For to think of objects of cognition as they are or would be for a knowing mind is a method necessary if we are to attain any truth at all. By this I do not mean merely the trivial tautology that what I cognize must stand in a relation, namely, the relation of being cognized, to a conscious mind, my own. I mean that to know any fact, X, or form any intelligible opinion about X, I must ultimately think X as it would be for a mind which was consciously aware of it as a present fact, though there may never be or have been such a mind...Thus ultimately we can only think of unperceived physical thinks in terms of a possible observer, in the sense that we must think them as if they were objects of actual present experience or rather conscious perception. A similar contention may be put forward even in regard to “necessary truths.” As far as I can see we can only think universal principles as true a priori by thinking them as in some sense necessary for any mind that accepts the premises on which they are based, by thinking of them as such that any mind which realized their meaning would be bound to accept them as true...The cognitive process…is idealistic…as it always involves thinking facts as they would be for as mind, as if they existed for a mind.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 56-58) 

“If we are to think of the spatial objects to which we usually give the name, physical, as existing unperceived by us…we must think of them…as objects of experience…by thinking of them as standing in the position of images relatively to a non-human experience….In order to think what physical objects are we must think of them as if they were objects of experience….For example, in order to give full intelligibility to propositions about the state of the earth prior to man, we must imagine some mind as contemplating it at the time when no human mind was in fact contemplating it, and think it as it would have been for that mind. We can make correct verbal statements without doing this, but this is the only way in which we can picture to ourselves what the statements really mean. In this sense, it may be true that propositions about material objects can only be interpreted in terms of experience, either actual experience or the imaginary experience of an imaginary observer.” (Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, 393-399) 

“There are, however, other ways to gloss Schopenhauer’s insistence that we cannot “imagine an objective world without a knowing subject.” One such alternative reading sets out from the thought that to conceive of a physical object, X, is to imagine X as perceived. And what is it to imagine X as perceived? It is to imagine how X would appear to a perceiver apprehending X from some perspective situated within the spatiotemporal world to which X belongs. To be sure, I may imagine an object—the Statue of Liberty, say—as perceived from more than one such perspective; of that there can be no doubt. However, what I cannot do is imagine it as it looks from the fabled “view from nowhere”—that is, as apprehended from absolutely no perspective at all. The upshot is that to conceive of a physical object is always to conceive of it as “object for a subject”—that is, to imagine how it would appear from some perspective or other. But if this is correct—if “in the existence of matter we always think only of its being represented by a subject”—then we cannot conceive of physical objects as they are “in themselves,” or apart from the standpoint of perceivers.” (McDermid, Schopenhauer and Transcendental Idealism, 9)

P2) But an actual, concrete unity of meaning, logically presupposes an actual, concrete "sense-bestowing" Experience; an Experience which said being is either one with, or, in which and for which, said being has an intentionally constituted, unified, and determinate character.

“All empirical unities…are indicators of absolute systems of experience…[are] mere unities of an intentional “constitution”…[are] “merely intentional,” and therefore merely “relative.” To hold that they exist in an absolute sense is therefore absurd….In a certain sense and with proper care in the use of words we may even say that all real unities are “unities of meaning”. Unities of meaning presuppose…a sense-giving consciousness which, on its side, is absolute and not dependent in its turn on sense bestowed on it from another source….Reality and world, here used, are just the titles for certain valid unities of meaning, namely, unities of “meaning” related to certain organizations of pure absolute consciousness which dispense meaning and show forth its validity in certain essentially fixed, specific ways….[T]he whole being of the world consists in a certain “meaning” which presupposes absolute consciousness as the field from which the meaning is derived…” (Husserl, Ideas, §54-§55)

“The general Significance of the world, and the definite sense of its particulars, is something of which we are conscious within our perceiving, representing, thinking, valuing life, and therefore something “constituted” in some subjective genesis….We have to recognize that Relativity to Consciousness is not only an actual quality of our world, but, from eidetic necessity, the quality of every conceivable world. We may, in a free fancy, vary our actual world, and transmute it to any other which we can imagine, but we are obliged with the world to vary ourselves also, and ourselves we cannot vary except within the limits prescribed to us by the nature of Subjectivity. Change worlds as we may, each must ever be a world such as we could experience, prove upon the evidence of our theories, and inhabit with our practice.” (Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology, 189-190)

“The [objective component of experience is the] component of the not-self within my center of experience on which I especially concentrate my attention in doing so….When I see an object, the objective component, the relevant given part of the not-self, possesses shape and color, and perhaps “suggested” qualities such as a degree of felt warmth or coolness. Likewise, it normally possesses as part of its inherent character qualities pertaining to the thing’s recognized or actualized use value and its cultural significance….The given shape of what lies within experience is essentially perspectival, [and] depend[s] upon the position of the perceiver….And, of course, there are all the facts about the way in which the sensible character of the objective component of experience depends, as very little learning shows us, on the…varying states of [ourselves]. The aesthetic aspect of every form and quality of the objective component, the perspectival character of every shape found there, and the manner in which the particular uses we envisage or utilize in the thing bite into every aspect of the given object’s inherent being, all make nonsense of the idea that anything resembling it in anything but the most abstract of ways could exist outside consciousness. These facts make nonsense too of the more naïve kind of representational realism according to which the objective component is a close likeness of the thing we perceive by way of it. Naïve realism is incoherent, then, so long as it includes the idea that the thing perceived has, or could have, a being outside all consciousness.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 42-44) 

“In opposition to this view of the cognitive relation, the anti-realist maintains that the knowing process and the object known cannot stand in a relation in which one of the terms, the object, is independent of the other, the knowing act. No knowledge is conceivable if such be the relation between the knower and the thing known; unless in manner, the cognitive process determines its object, unless it works upon it and gives it a character, a significance in accordance with its own principles of working. He contends that the realist’s object since it is independent of our cognitive thinking, cannot even be thought about; no conception or idea can be relevant to it; it can therefore have no meaning, no definable content; and such as object, if we call it an object, is absolutely unknowable.” (Russell, A First Course in Philosophy, 154-155) 

“Experience is real, and it gives us our conviction of the reality of the world and ourselves….Experience subsists in the subject, and can only subsist thus; but the subject only experiences when related to an object. Hence we may not abstract experience from the subject or the object, certainly not from both. To reason to ultimate conclusions respecting anything, we must think of it in its true relations. To separate experience or any phase of it from the subject is to take it out of its true relations and to relate it externally to the subject and to experience; whereas it is in and of the subject and is therefore internally related….Every object of your experience has its being in the universe of your experience; it is a part of the universe as you conceive it and is organically united in your experience with everything with which you have had commerce. An arm has its being and its meaning as an organic part of a body. When we think of a man's arm, our thought involves an implicit recognition of his body. So every particular of your experience has its being and its meaning for you in its organic union with your experience as a whole; and when you think that object apart from the whole, there is involved in your thought an implicit recognition of the whole. No portion of experience can be particularized without implication of the whole of experience. No particular experience is merely a particular experience. No experience is simply an experience of the particular object.” (Fletcher, An Introduction to Philosophy, 131-183)

C1) Therefore, no actual, concrete being is conceivable otherwise than as a being which is one with an actual, concrete Experience, or a being which is in and for an actual, concrete Experience. [From P1 and P2]

P3) But an actual, concrete being which is one with an actual, concrete Experience is just an actual, concrete Experience, and a being which is in and for an actual, concrete Experience is just a determination thereof.

“To understand, much more to know, spiritual reality, is to assimilate it with ourselves who know it. We may even say that a law of the knowledge of spiritual reality is that the object be resolved into the subject. Nothing has for us spiritual value save insofar as it comes to be resolved into ourselves who know it….When we speak of spiritual fact we speak of mind, and to speak of mind is always to speak of concrete, historical individuality; of a subject which is not thought as such, but which is actualized as such. The spiritual reality, then, which is the object of our knowing, is not mind and spiritual fact, it is purely and simply mind as subject. As subject, it can, as we have said, be known on one condition only—it can be known only insofar as its objectivity is resolved in the real activity of the subject who knows it. In no other way is a spiritual world conceivable. Whoever conceives it, if he has truly conceived it as spiritual, cannot set it up in opposition to his own activity in conceiving it. Speaking strictly, there can be no others outside us, for in knowing them and speaking of them they are within us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness as such. Other is a kind of stage of our mind through which we must pass in obedience to our immanent nature, but we must pass through without stopping. ” (Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 10-13)

“When we present the concept of our consciousness to ourselves we can only conceive it as a sphere whose radius is infinite. Because, whatever effort we make to think or imagine other things or other consciousnesses outside our own consciousness, these things or consciousnesses remain within it, precisely because they are posited by us, even though posited as external to us. The without is always within; it denotes, that is to say, a relation between two terms which, though eternal to one another, are both entirely internal to consciousness. There is for us nothing which is not something we perceive, and this means that however we define it, whether as external or internal, it is admitted within our sphere, it is an object for which we are the object. Useless is the appeal to the ignorance in which, as we know by experience, we once were and others may now be of the realities within our subjective sphere. In so far as we are actually ignorant of them, they are not posited by consciousness and therefore do not come within its sphere. It is clear that our very ignorance is not a fact unless at the same time it is a cognition. That is to say, we are ignorant only insofar either as we ourselves perceive that we do not know or as we perceive that others perceive what we do not. So that ignorance is a fact to which experience can appeal only because it is known. And in knowing ignorance we know also the object of ignorance as being external to the ambit of a given knowing. But external or internal it is always in relation to, and so within, some consciousness….And as we move with thought along all that is thinkable, we never come to our thought’s margin, we never come up against something other than thought, the presence of which brings thought to a stop….[The mind] is never able to refer to an object which is external to it, never able therefore to  be conceived as itself a real among reals, as a part only of the reality….Our whole experience moves between the unity of its center, which is mind, and the infinite multiplicity of the points constituting the sphere of its objects.” (Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 28-31)

“If I am to distinguish myself from any other reality, then, obviously, I must be conscious of this other reality. But how can I be conscious of it without it being in me? If the objects of consciousness were outside me, they would make no difference to my internal state, and, therefore, I should not be conscious of them. And, also, if they were outside me, I should not exist. For the pure I, though doubtless an essential moment of the self; is only a moment, and cannot stand alone. If we withdraw from it all its content—the objects of cognition and volition—it would be a mere abstract nonentity….Thus the nature of the self is sufficiently paradoxical. What does it include? Everything of which it is conscious. What does it exclude? Equally—everything of which it is conscious. What can it say is not inside it? Nothing. What can it say is not outside it? A single abstraction.” (McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 21-24)

C2) Therefore, no actual, concrete being is conceivable otherwise than as an actual, concrete Experience or a determination thereof. [From C1 and P3]

P4) But Reality is actual and concrete—and Reality is not a determination of anything higher than itself; for Reality is self-determined, and has all of its determinations “internal” to itself.

“Ultimate reality [is that] into which all else can be resolved and which cannot itself be resolved into anything beyond, that in terms of which all else can be expressed and which cannot itself be expressed in terms of anything outside itself.” (Haldane, The Pathway to Reality, 19) 

“For Reality…must be a complete individual whole, with the ground of all its differentiations within itself.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 255)

“The whole…is a self-differentiating system. It is a whole that determines, by the principle of organization that is universal to all its parts and moments, the nature and interrelations of its elements, making them mutually interdependent and constitutive. Accordingly, if their distinction one from another is elevated into a separation, and if they are severally isolated from each other and from the system, as is wont to happen under the influence and operation of the understanding, they contradict themselves and one another, a contradiction symptomatic of defect that is occasioned by their mutual exclusion and the oversight of their mutual complementarity.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 142-143) 

C3) Therefore, Reality is conceivable only insofar as Reality is conceived as an actual, concrete Experience. [From C2 and P4]