December 6th, 2021

“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] 

“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, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 10-13) 

“When we present the concept of our consciousness to ourselves we can only conceive it as a sphere who 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, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 28-31) 

“We mean by nature something the mind finds confronting it, something already realized when we are brought into relation with it; and positivism is nothing but the philosophy which conceives reality as fact, independent of any relation to the mind which studies it. History presents, indeed, in the positive character of its events, an analogy with nature; but its intelligibility consists in the unity of the real to which it belongs on the one side and in the mentality of the historian on the other. The history of a past is impossible if it is found unintelligible (if, for example, it is attested by undecipherable documents). Between the personages of history and ourselves there must be a common language, a common mentality, an identity of problems, of interests, of thought. This means that it must pertain to one and the same world with ourselves, to one and the same process of reality. History, therefore, is not already realized when we set out on our historical research; it is our own life in act. If then nature is nature insofar only as it precedes the thought of nature, history is history in so far only as it is the thought of the historian….[A]n indispensable condition of understanding nature, as we understand history, in its movement, is that the object be not detached from the subject and posited in itself, independent, in its unattainable transcendence. As transcendent object it can only be effectively posited as object already thought and thereby it is shown to be immanent in the thinking, but considered abstractly in a way which separates it from the thinking itself. And then it is obvious that what we find within the object is what we have put there.” (Gentile, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 50-53) 

“The nature and the history of ordinary discourse are abstract nature and abstract history, and, as such, non-existent. The otherness which is the fundamental characteristic of each, were it as absolute as it appears, would imply the absolute unknowability of both, but it would also imply—as a fact of much more important—the impossibility of mind. For if there be something outside the mind in the absolute sense, the mind must be limited by it, and then it is no longer free, and no longer mind since mind is freedom. But the otherness of history and of nature, if we possess the real concept of the absoluteness of the “I,” is no other than the objectivity of the “I” to itself which we have already analyzed. Nature and history are, in so far as they are the creation of the “I” which finds them within itself, and produces them in its eternal process of self-creation. This does not mean, as those who trust to common sense imagine in dismay, that reality is a subjective illusion. Reality is true reality, in the most literal and unambiguous sense, in being the subject itself, the “I.” The “I” is not self-conscious except as a consciousness of the self, determined as some thing. The reality of the self-consciousness is in the consciousness, and the reality of the consciousness in the self-consciousness. The consciousness of a self-consciousness is indeed its own reality, it is not imprisoned in the self as a result or conclusion, but is a dialectical moment. This means that our intellect grows with what we know. Thus it is that our only way of distinguishing between the old knowledge and the new knowing is by analysis and abstraction: for the self-consciousness is one, and consciousness is consciousness of the self-consciousness. Therefore the development of self-consciousness, or, avoiding the pleonasm, self-consciousness, is the world process itself, nature and history, insofar as it is a self-consciousness realized in consciousness. If we give the name “history” to this development of mind, then the history which is consciousness is the history of this self-consciousness and what we call the past is only the actual present in its concreteness.” (Gentile, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 263-264) 

“Idealism reconciles all distinctions, but does not, like mysticism, cancel them, and it affirms the finite no less resolutely than it affirms the infinite, difference no less than identity.” (Gentile, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 266-267) 

“In idealism, the subject coincides with the “I” who affirms the object.” (Gentile, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 268) 

“There is only one way of overcoming intellectualism and that is not to turn our back on it but to look it square in the face. Only so is it possible to conceive and form an adequate idea of knowledge. It is our way and we may sum it up briefly thus: we do not suppose as a logical antecedent of knowledge the reality which is the object of knowledge; we conceive the intellect as itself will, freedom, morality; and we cancel that independent nature of the world, which makes it appear the basis of mind, by recognizing that it is only an abstract moment of mind. True anti-intellectualism indeed is identical with true intellectualism, when once we understand intellectualism as that which has not voluntarism opposed to it, and is therefore no longer one of two antagonistic terms but the unity of both. And such is our idealism, which in overcoming every vestige of transcendence in regard to the actuality of mind can, as we have said, comprehend within it the most radical, most logical, and the sincerest, conception of Christianity.” (Gentile, Teoria Generale Dello Spirito Come Atto Puro, 273-274)

“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 materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is infinite.” (Gentile, The Reform of Education, 56-57)