25 Facts About Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher, educator, and politician.

Giovanni Gentile won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.

In 1922, Giovanni Gentile was named Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini.

In 1925, Giovanni Gentile headed two constitutional reform commissions that helped establish the corporate state of Fascism.

Giovanni Gentile would go on to serve as president of the Fascist state's Grand Council of Public Education, and even gained membership on the powerful Fascist Grand Council.

Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as "the philosopher of Fascism"; moreover, he was the ghostwriter of the first part of the essay The Doctrine of Fascism, attributed to Mussolini.

Giovanni Gentile wrote the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals which was signed by a number of writers and intellectuals, including Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.

Giovanni Gentile became a member of the Fascist Grand Council in 1925, and remained loyal to Mussolini even after the fall of the Fascist government in 1943.

Giovanni Gentile supported Mussolini's establishment of the "Republic of Salo", a puppet state of Nazi Germany, despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws, and accepted an appointment in its government.

Giovanni Gentile was the last president of the Royal Academy of Italy.

On March 30,1944, Giovanni Gentile received death threats blaming him for the execution of the Martyrs of Campo di Marte by Republic of Salo troops and accusing him of promoting neo-fascism.

When Giovanni Gentile lowered the car window to speak to them, he was immediately hit with several bullets to the chest and heart, killing him.

Giovanni Gentile was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.

Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Giovanni Gentile postulated the opposite, that the subject is concrete and the object a mere abstraction.

Giovanni Gentile was, because of his actualist system, a notable philosophical presence across Europe during his time.

Benedetto Croce objected that Giovanni Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's will.

Therefore, Giovanni Gentile proposed a form of what he called "absolute Immanentism" in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process.

Many times accused of solipsism, Giovanni Gentile maintained his philosophy to be a Humanism that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was colligate in perception; the self's human thinking, in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore not modeled as objects to one's own thinking.

Giovanni Gentile considered Fascism the fulfillment of the Risorgimento ideals, particularly those represented by Giuseppe Mazzini and the Historical Right party.

Giovanni Gentile sought to make his philosophy the basis for Fascism.

Giovanni Gentile placed himself within the Hegelian tradition, but sought to distance himself from those views he considered erroneous.

Giovanni Gentile criticized Hegel's dialectic, and instead proposed that everything is Spirit, with the dialectic residing in the pure act of thinking.

Giovanni Gentile believed Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making.

The dialectic to Giovanni Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking.

Giovanni Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no 'positive' independently existing dialectical object.