20

Giovanni Gentile

The Act of Thinking as Pure Act1

1. Faith in Truth

There is no philosophical or scientific inquiry, there is no thinking of

any kind unless the thinking has faith in itself or in its own value, unless
there is spontaneous and unyielding conviction of thinking the truth.
The sceptic, who thinks he has cut this faith off at the root by suspending
judgment – as the only reasonable alternative left to his thinking – stops
with the unshaken certainty that his suspension is reasonable, and, since
he continues to think, faith in this stubborn and empty thought of his is
what he goes on.
The fact of thinking, and therefore of philosophy, whatever the solu-
tion at which it aims, presupposes this affirmation of the truth of think-
ing as it thinks what it actually thinks.2

2. Abstract Thinking and Concrete Thinking

The thinking whose truth is asserted by the foregoing consideration –

the only thinking whose truth can be asserted, since, in fact, it is the
only thinking that really is thinking – is not abstract thinking but con-
crete thinking. And the difficulty that ordinarily conceals from the
philosopher’s consciousness the obvious truth stated above consists in
looking for thinking in abstract thinking rather than in concrete think-
ing: for example, when we say that thinking is the thinking of another
or our own thinking already thought, or, in both cases, not real think-
ing in the proper sense but only the object of thinking in its abstract
objectivity.
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3. The First Moment of Abstract Thinking

I said ‘abstract objectivity’ because I mean that the objectivity attributed

in that case to thinking as an object of our thinking is not, in its turn,
the concrete objectivity that in fact is conferred on thinking by asserting
it, by thinking it, in other words, but is an inadequate interpretation of
this objectivity through an effort of abstraction. Another’s thinking is not
something we can think, even by willing to think it as another’s, except
by thinking it as thinking, by meaning it, or by discerning and recogniz-
ing its value, and, in other, perhaps provisional, terms, by agreeing to it
and making it ours.
Our own thinking – once thought, however – is not thought again
except inasmuch as it comes back to life in actual thinking: in other
words, only inasmuch as it is not the thinking of one occasion, distinct
from present thinking, but actual thinking itself, at least provisionally.
Hence, to think a thought (or to posit thinking objectively) is to realize
it, or rather to negate it in its abstract objectivity by affirming it in a con-
crete objectivity that is not beyond the subject since it exists in virtue of
the act of this subject.

4. The Second Moment of Abstract Thinking

But this is a first moment of thinking another’s thinking, or thinking what

is our own and no longer our own (past). If this moment were never over-
come, the thinking of another would be (through us) only our own, and
past thinking would just be present. We would know only our own actual
thinking. Behind the first moment stands another, and we will soon (§18)
see why. Here it suffices to note that if this second moment, made possible
by the first, annuls the actuality of the other’s thinking, or of what is our
own and no longer our own, it is in a new act of thinking that the second
moment annuls it. Thereby realized as a function of the new thinking,
our own and actual, is the new objectivity (the true and effective objectiv-
ity) conferred on this thinking that our thinking expels from itself and
accordingly treats as objective. And this objectivity is an organic element
of the immanent unity of this thinking.

5. Thinking Absolutely Actual or Our Own

Therefore, what we call the thinking of another, or our own in the past,
is, in a first moment, our own actual thinking, and, in a second moment,

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a part of our actual thinking, a part inseparable from the whole to which
it belongs, and therefore real in the unity of the whole itself. Hence, the
only concrete thinking is our own actual thinking. And since our non-
actual thinking is no longer our own, we may say that the only concrete
thinking is our own thinking absolutely (but see the meaning of this we
as the subject of our thinking in its context). Equally may one say that
only concrete thinking is absolutely actual thinking, since the thinking
that is not our own is not actual thinking.

6. Thinking as Nature

As a consequence of the preceding consideration, the passage from the

first to the second of the moments described above – by which one thinks
a thinking that is not our own actual thinking – implies the devaluation
of the thinking as thinking, or the assertion that what we have thought
(in the first moment) is not thinking, since it is not concrete thinking, is
not absolutely our own thinking; or else the assertion that what we have
thought is now not thinking but a negation of thinking – the extension of
the Cartesians, nature, the unthinkable, the limit of thinking, that which
thinking cannot penetrate because it has already penetrated it. (For
example, ‘the uncancelled days’ of Ermengarda, or Francesca’s memory
‘in misery of the happy time’: spiritual states turned to stone in the past,
ineluctable, inexorable, as harsh as the most painful laws of nature, more
painful because more deaf to the voice of the Spirit.)3
The passage from the first to the second moment is therefore the pas-
sage from thinking to nature. Nature, then, taken in its concrete reality,
is the thinking that thinking begins to think as other than itself, or think-
ing fixed in its abstractness.
Nature is abstract; only thinking is concrete (cf. §9).

7. Error

Thinking that is absolutely our own or absolutely actual is true precisely

because it is our own or actual. Error comes from the thinking that can-
not be thought, from what another thinks and we cannot think, or what
we have already thought but now can think no longer. What we think
actually, if we think it, we think as truth. (Or else we think error, as error,
but thinking that it is error and thus thinking the truth.)
And error is not an accidental attribute of another’s thinking or of
thinking no longer our own: indeed, it is necessary.

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If we call this non-actual thinking ‘nature,’ in place of the naturalist

motto, Natura sive Deus, we must substitute the idealist motto, Natura sive
error.4 The reason why this thinking is not actual, as we have seen (§4), is
that it has been overcome, because having thought it, in other words, we
can no longer think it. And by continuing to live as thinking beings, we
must think otherwise. Now what can no longer be thought, after having
been thought, is exactly what error is.
Error is abstract, then; only the truth is concrete.

8. The Principle of Identity and the Dialectical Law

If error is the thinking that cannot be thought, the true is the thinking
that cannot not be thought: two necessities, which are only one necessity.
Verum norma sui et falsi.5 Thinking thinks itself inasmuch as it thinks itself
necessarily, which is to say, inasmuch as we think by not being able to
think otherwise. Every act of thinking is an exclusion of another act of
thinking (not of all the other possible acts, but of the one thought imme-
diately before). Omnis determinatio est negatio.6 And therefore only by my
becoming aware of an error and freeing myself from it do I know a truth
– and think, in other words. In this living bond that joins (concrete)
truth to (abstract) error is the root of thinking and the fundamental law
of logic. The necessity expressed by the old logic in the law of identity is
an abstract necessity, and likewise abstract was the thinking or the truth
at which that logic aimed, winding through a maze of contradictions.
The principle of identity (or of contradiction), A = A, declares a neces-
sity in regard to what has been called abstract thinking, in regard to
nature, in other words, which, by definition, is the negation of thinking
and thus cannot admit to itself any kind of logical law. A = A is the law of
error in its abstractness. Hence, whatever had been thought according
to such a law would for that very reason be error. There is no thinking,
in fact, that resolves itself into A = A.
Logical necessity is of the real or concrete process of thinking that
instead could be formulated schematically as A = non-A. In fact, every
act of thinking is a negation of an act of thinking, a present in which the
past dies, and thus a unity of these two moments. Take away the present,
and you will have the past blind (abstract nature); take away the past, and
you will have the present empty (abstract thinking or another nature).
Truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself, and,
by annulling itself, really is – an unthinkable proposition as long as think-
ing is taken to be abstract thinking, where being, having been fixed, can
only be; on the other hand, it is a proposition that cannot not be thought

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when by thinking one means concrete thinking, absolutely actual think-

ing (so that the truth of the concept of becoming can be grasped only in
regard to that true becoming that is thinking – the dialectic).
The principle of identity should be replaced, therefore, not by the
equally abstract principle of becoming, pure and simple, but by the prin-
ciple of the dialectic or of the thinking as activity that posits itself by
negating itself.
This is the principle that is not the abolition of the principle of iden-
tity but rather its verification, since the dialectic denies not the truth of
truth but the fixity of truth and thus asserts that the truth is itself – but
in its movement.

9. The Freedom of Thinking

The dialectical necessity of thinking coincides with the freedom of think-

ing because all limits are produced by the same dialectic of thinking.
The limit of thinking cannot be a limit of thinking (§6) unless it starts by
being thinking itself, unless, as limit, it is in the sphere of thinking itself.
Nature – the only possible limit of thinking – is nature only abstractly; in
the concrete it is thinking in its internal mediation.

10. The Universality of Thinking

Absolutely actual thinking is universal by its very necessity.

The universality of Plato and of Aristotle (parallel to the identity of
every concept with itself), the kind desired by the realists and fought by
the nominalists, is abstract universality because it is the universality of
abstract thinking. One cannot speak of the universality of the concept
of man, of animal, of triangle, of number, because there are no such
concepts either in heaven or on earth; instead, there is the thinking that
thinks these concepts. And the thinking of these concepts cannot be
thinking in general, divine thinking (of a God who is other than us),
if the only concrete thinking is absolutely our own thinking. The only
thinkable universality, then, is that of our act of thinking. It is an act that
is universal in the sense that, inasmuch as it is necessary, it is posited as
the thinking not of a particular thinker from whom other thinkers, also
being particulars, may diverge, but rather as the thinking of one who
thinks through them all. When Galileo writes,

taking understanding intensive, inasmuch as this term implies understand-

ing some proposition intensively or perfectly, in other words,

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he says

that the human intellect thus understands some of them

namely, all of them that it does understand

perfectly, and so of these it has as much absolute certainty as nature itself

has.

Notice this universality of actual thinking in its necessity. But Galileo

adds,

such are the pure mathematical sciences, geometry and arithmetic, of

which the divine intellect certainly knows infinitely more propositions

another’s thinking (§4, 6), which instead is the negation of thinking

because it knows them all, yet I believe that the knowledge of those few
that are understood by the human intellect equals the divine in objective
certainty since it comes to grasp the necessity beyond which, it seems, there
can be no greater assurance.

And one should say, on the contrary, that not only pure mathematics but
all our own thinking (even the most useless trifles) is real in the act that
thinks itself.7

11. The Empirical I and the Absolute I

If the thinking is our own inasmuch as it is universal, if there are other

cases of thinking, or one other case, only in terms of an abstraction, as
thinking is in its abstract objectivity, then the thinking does not arise
from our individuality. But our own individuality, if it is ours because it
is deep within us, or better because it is deep, present to itself, is univer-
sal – indeed, the universal concentrated and therefore made real in the
One of consciousness. The we as subject of our thinking is not the I that
has the not-I (another) or I-others (others) opposed to it, and hence it is
not the empirical I that is apparent, one among many, to psychological
observation. It is the absolute I, the One as I. It negates itself not only as
thinking about things and I-others (note: about others, not belonging
to I-others) but also as thinking about itself empirically conceived, as

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one I among many or among things, since an I of this sort is a particular

among particulars and thus no longer that universal which is the true I.
That particular I in which the I negates itself (and must negate itself) is
nature, not thinking. True idealism cannot be solipsist, then, because it
has overcome the position of solipsism (a concept of the world closed
within the particular ipse).8

12. The Eternity of Thinking and Time

Thinking in its actuality, or as universal I, contains and therefore over-

comes not only the spatiality of pure nature but also the temporality of
pure natural happening. Thinking is eternal, beyond time. In fact, time
is a form of what we are thinking and therefore of thinking as having
been thought in its abstract objectivity. When, in the act of thinking it, we
attend to what we think, all points of time, distinct and successive, merge
and contract into a single and unmultipliable point.
To read a book, hours and hours will be needed; beyond the first will
come the second, beyond the second the third, and so on – and the
reverse. But anyone who gets to the end and does not think the whole
book together by holding all of it present does not understand, does
not think that book. And what belongs to the totality, once the temporal
series is used up, belongs to every part at the corresponding point of
time. Taking this into account, thinking – inasmuch as it is thinking – is
what is all at once, all present together in a single instant. Therefore, the
instant – the ™xa…fnhj – of thinking is not an instant among instants, is
not in time, has no before nor after, is eternal.9 And therefore every act
of thinking in all its absolute forms – philosophical system, poem, flash-
ing and fleeting intuition – realizes itself as something eternal whose
value was not born and will not die.

13. The Unity of Thinking and Number

Absolutely actual thinking, or the absolute I, since it is not subject to

time, is not subject to number. Incipis numerare, incipis errare.10 Number
is not on this account a simple auxilium imaginationis except inasmuch
as one aims to fix before the mind the process of the dialectic eternally
unravelling itself from its moments.11 Number is legitimate abstraction
where one refers to abstract reality (nature, or thinking in its pure objec-
tivity). Nature, because it is the negation of thinking, is the negation of
unity, and hence it is number. Thus it is the negation of freedom – mech-

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anism, in other words. Multiplicity, abstractly considered as pure multi-

plicity, cannot be understood except mechanically. Accordingly, nature
is conceived deterministically as subject to the category of causality.

14. The Solution of the Antinomies

Nature, multiple and mechanical precisely because it is abstract, is a real-

ity, an object of an abstract science (a special science) not of the concrete
(philosophical) science. And the solution of all the antinomies of reason
pointed out by Kant is discovered just as soon as one notices the abstract-
ness of nature or of the world viewed in its pure objectivity. This world of
time and space is necessarily finite because it is necessarily particular. It
contains no simple element because its law is multiplicity. Since number
demands unity as its element, multiplicity would have no hope if unity
in the domain of the multiple had to be an absolute unity rather than a
provisional and therefore arbitrary unity, exactly as the determination of
the particular can be, deferring the problem to the concept of another
particular. Thus, even though the series of causes in a mechanical (non-
philosophical) system has a principle that makes determination possible,
this principle is not absolute because it is relative to a particular reality
that always has another one behind and alongside it. And in short there
is nothing necessary in the world because everything is particular and so
everything is conditioned. The force of logic that posits, counter to each
thesis, its antithesis overcomes the abstractness of the Kantian world and
will discover exactly that concrete reality to which it belongs as antithesis.
It passes from the world of facts, which are many and nothing other than
many (belonging to a multiplicity that contradicts itself as soon as one
wants to think it absolutely), to the world of the act that is one, as the
root of the many.

15. Thinking as Will

The act, if it is not to be converted into a fact, must be grasped in its

actual nature of pure act: all it can be is thinking. The fact is the negation
of thinking, from which thinking itself creates for itself its other.
Once having descended from the act to the fact, we are outside of
thought, in the world of nature. There are no spiritual facts, only acts;
indeed, there is nothing that is not the act of the Spirit, which in itself
undergoes no opposition of any sort. In contrast with thinking, will (emo-
tionality or practical activity) can only be other than thinking, other than

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thinking itself, not as act but as fact – what has already been thought and
thus has become nature.

16. Absolute Immanence

If beyond this other-than-thinking that is past thinking (logically, not

chronologically past), more or less remote, another were posited as
opposed to thinking in its origin, it would eo ipso be stripped of all its
essential attributes, from unity up to truth, on and on, through all the
attributes already exhibited.12 And it would no longer be thinking. Cogi-
to, ergo sum. Sum substantia cogitans. Quatenus substantia, in me sum et per me
concipior: hoc est, mei conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei a quo formari
debeat.13 Nothing, in short, transcends thinking. Thinking is absolute
immanence.

17. Potency and the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Outside of actual thinking there is no altera res, neither actually nor

potentially: not actually because of the preceding consideration; not
potentially – in other words, as potency of the act that is absolutely
our thinking – because potency is a category that can have a meaning
through the world of facts, nature, generation, and corruption, not in
the world of the act that is eternal.14 As possibility – Leibniz is correct – it
needs to be completed by sufficient reason in order to pass into act. But
this sufficient reason is other than possible, and this otherness implies
multiplicity, which is the category of facts, of the universe. The principle
of sufficient reason is in its place in Leibnizian pluralism (which, like
all the old metaphysics, is just a conception of the world of facts or of
thinking in its abstract objectivity), but it has no meaning in an idealistic
monism of the absolute act or sub specie aeternitatis.15
The principle of sufficient reason, completing that of identity, sup-
poses the latter to be true, and hence it is on the same plane: it too is
false. From possibility to sufficient reason there is a leap that breaks the
lex continui at its roots.16 Virtuality is a compromise. The true act cannot
be transcended. And Leibnizian virtuality, when it becomes the Kantian
category or form, will be just pure act.

18. The Process of Thinking

The act of the I is consciousness in that it is self-consciousness: the object

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of the I is the I itself. Every cognitive process is an act of self-conscious-

ness. This is not abstract identity and immobility but concrete act. If it
were something identical, inert, it would need another to be moved. But
that would annihilate its freedom. Its movement is not a posterius in rela-
tion to its being; it coincides with the being.17 Self-consciousness is move-
ment itself or process.
As originating or absolute process, it does not need to be made other.
It is otherness within: not being, but being that bends back on itself, thus
negating itself as being. A thing (abstractly considered, fixed by abstrac-
tion) is (always that), but precisely for that reason it is not thinking –
self-consciousness, in other words. No one has been given permission
to stop at that abstraction, as has been seen. As soon as the Spirit stops
or seems to stop, the voice of logic is quick to cry out, ‘What laziness,
what is this delay?’ It needs to move, to enter into the concrete, into the
eternal process of thinking. And here being moves in a circle, turning
back on itself and thus annihilating itself as being. Here is its life, its
becoming: thinking. It is not pure thesis nor pure antithesis, not being
and not non-being, but synthesis, that singular act that we are – Think-
ing. Being (thesis) in its abstraction is nothing, or rather nothing to do
with thinking (which is the true being). But this thinking that is eternal
is never preceded by a nothing of its own. In fact, this nothing is posited
by it, and, because it is a nothing of thinking, it is a thinking of nothing,
or rather thinking – everything, in other words. It is not the thesis that
makes the synthesis possible, but the reverse: the synthesis makes the
thesis possible, creating it along with its own antithesis or rather creating
itself. And therefore the pure act is self-creation.

19. Philosophy and History

The real, therefore, is self-creation because it is thinking. Thinking is the

first dawn of consciousness (every psychic fact in that it is consciousness,
in that it is act, in other words). Thinking is the whole of consciousness,
including philosophy. Hence, it has two essential moments: first, it is
reality, that reality which is thinking (by which all forms of scepticism
are annulled), reality itself enacting its own inwardness; second, it is con-
cept, thinking, consciousness of reality, and thus intrinsic overcoming of
the prior moment. It is being and the consciousness of being, life and
the mirror of life, and it is that in conformity with the essence of the pure
act (self-creation) in general – being in that it is consciousness of being.
And if the process of reality, that infinite and eternal dialectic which is

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thinking, is history, then philosophy is history and is an overcoming of

history by thinking about it. It is history alive in the thinking of history
– thinking, please note, always as pure act, and therefore never to be
limited by the empirical determinations of history shattered in space and
time – our own thinking, but our own absolutely because it is absolutely
actual.

NOTES

1 Gentile first delivered this paper in 1911 in a meeting of his Philosophical

Library in Palermo (see section 23 of the Introduction): it was first printed
as Gentile (1912) and then included in Gentile (1913), the version used
here. Section 23 of the Introduction also cites later versions.
2 The word ‘thinking’ in the title translates the infinitive pensare, but in the
text that follows Gentile’s most frequent choice is the noun pensiero, almost
always rendered here as ‘thinking’; Gentile emphasizes the active force
of the word, meaning something less static than the English ‘thought,’
which in our translation sometimes represents pensato, the past participle of
pensare, indicating an act (atto) of thinking (pensiero) that has already been
thought (pensato) and is therefore past (passato) and not actual (attuale). For
this last distinction, it is important that attuale, unlike the English ‘actual,’
is more temporal than ontological; when attuale means ‘existing,’ the claim
for existence suggests current or present existence. On the other hand,
attuale is cognate with atto (‘act’ or ‘deed’) and with attuare (‘actualize,’
‘realize’). Finally, notice that in section 16 of this piece Gentile treats past
thinking as past in a logical, not a temporal, sense.
3 Dante meets Francesca da Rimini with the lustful in the second circle of
Hell; her betrothed killed her when he caught her with his younger brother,
Paolo. In reply to Dante’s pitying question about her fate, Francesca answers
that ‘there is no greater pain than in misery to remember the happy time’:
Inferno, 5.121−3. The other quotation, referring to Ermengarda in Alessan-
dro Manzoni’s tragedy Adelchi (1822), is from the chorus that closes the first
scene of the fourth act:

In the sleepless shadows

Through lonely cloisters
Amidst the chanting of the virgins
To the entreated altars,
The uncancelled days
Always return in thinking.

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4 ‘Nature or God,’ in Spinoza’s notorious phrase, replaced here by ‘Nature or

error.’
5 ‘Verum index sui et falsi’: ‘Truth is the index of itself and of the false’ comes
from a letter by Spinoza (76.7), cited by Jacobi (2004): 33, and then by
Hegel (1986a), 16.62. Croce also cites it in chap. 5 of his ‘Philosophy of
Hegel,’ attributing it to Bacon.
6 In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel attributes ‘every determination is a nega-
tion’ to Spinoza, but Spinoza’s words are not quite the same: see Spinoza,
Letter 50; Hegel (1986a), 8.196 ; (1991): 147
7 The Latin intensive means ‘intensively’ in contrast to ‘extensively’: Galileo’s
point is that intensive understanding is much greater in humans than exten-
sive understanding, but Gentile, glossing Galileo’s words, also puns on the
Italian intendere (to understand) and the Latin intensive: Galileo (2005), II,
135.
8 He himself.
9 Dzxa…fnhj: all of a sudden.
10 The Latin means ‘start to count and start to go wrong,’ a phrase that
Cusanus attributed to Augustine in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae; something
close occurs in Augustine’s Treatise on John’s Gospel (MPL 35:1683): ‘Ubi
cogitare coeperis, incipis numerare: ubi numeraveris, quid numeraveris non
potes respondere.’
11 ‘Aid to imagination,’ another phrase from Spinoza, which he used to
describe various ways of quantifying, including time.
12 Eo ipso: for this very reason.
13 The Latin seems to be Gentile’s: ‘I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking
substance. Inasmuch as I am substance, I am in myself, and I am conceived
through myself: that is, the concept of me does not need a concept of
another thing by which it should be formed.’
14 Altera res: other thing.
15 Under the form of eternity: another Spinozan phrase.
16 Law of the continuum.
17 Posterius: after.

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