Actual Idealism was a form of idealism developed by Giovanni Gentile that grew into a 'grounded' idealism contrasting the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the Absolute idealism of Georg Hegel. ... Giovanni Gentile in his earlier years. ... Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant which was influential in much subsequent German philosophy. ... His tomb and its pillared enclosure outside the cathedral in Königsberg are some of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered East Prussia in 1945. ... Absolute Idealism is a ontologically monistic philosophy. ... Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ...

Acceptance

It was successful in laying a theory of regarding thought that garnered enough attention to prove a competition to the new waves of positivism and therefore materialist conceptions of social life that were vying for reformist tendencies in the politics of the time. Its ideas therefore were key to helping the Fascist party consolidate power in Italy with its own reform, and integral to giving Fascism the content of its revolution sentiment. Positivism can have several meanings. ... This article primarily focuses on the general concepts of matter and existence. ... Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, was the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. ...

Tenets

Actual Idealism holds that; It is the act of thinking as percipience, not creative thought as imagination, which defines reality. Therefore one idea or another can only be a formulation of particulars within the bounds of a known totality that one idea is not on any side of those particulars. Totality constituting the whole cohesive reality, is negated in such idea by itself. Integration of totality against idea in appealing to oneself is the sole fruitful means of idea, which poses no favoritism to the developed ideas giving a knowing precedence to the world it has created itself into. Anything less is a presupposition and therefore innately unreal. This totality is the act of thinking, not thoughts so regarded by thinking.

Explanation

While realists agree the world known to them is the only one they possibly know 'as a static concept,' they continue to regard something real about the concept having nothing to do with their thinking. Actual Idealists disregard the static concept as totally false in regard to the world for them where the only real is in 'the act of thinking' within being. Realism is commonly defined as a concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary. ...

The stance of Realism claims that repeatability of experience gives proof of a basis which transcends and outruns our percepts, refuting Idealism. Yet it does not consider that the process of thinking as creation and the thought about thinking as abstraction interchange depending on the quality of one's act. It is the process of thinking that creates thought, which may not recur, but what occurs as thinking of it is what cannot be outrun as a conceptualization because it is the very immanent process of it, which is what definitely is. Not as thoughts perceived, but as perceptive thinking prior to being construed outside its own totality as a thought, not made an abstraction, which cannot exist or be supposed to exist in any form outside one's thinking. Only one's thought reached from- and thus put outside of- thinking can be surpassed; but only by thinking, not by an abstract external.

Actual Idealism therefore rejects the Hegelian 'Absolute' as being a presupposition unprovable to the mind, unless considered to be synonymous with what's known or the totality of the act of thinking. Which therein would put the dialectical processes making 'self' & 'not self' a consideration proving external existence real insofar as it is in reality part of the self's own thinking. Being that the self regarded alone is always a concept and cannot be given reality as such. Neither does Actual Idealism admit archetypal concepts in that possible conception of them in relation to all else gives them no reality. Gentile made a pivotal distinction to factors concerning Idealism's own criteria for reality which have stood since Berkeley's adage "Esse est percepi" by distingushing between "pensiero pensante" the 'act of thinking', and the 'static thought' "pensiero pensato". Archetype is defined as an original model of which all other similar persons, objects, or concepts are merely derivative, copied, patterned, or emulated. ... Bishop George Berkeley George Berkeley (British English://; Irish English: //) (March 12, 1685 – January 14, 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley, was an influential Irish philosopher whose primary philosophical achievement is the advancement of what has come to be called subjective idealism, summed up in his dictum, Esse est percipi (To...

Further reading in English on Actual Idealism

• 'The Theory of Mind as Pure Act' (Giovanni Gentile; Herbert Wildon Carr, London, Macmillan, 1922) ISBN 1903331293
• 'The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile' (Roger W. Holmes, Macmillan, 1937) ISBN 0404169481
• 'The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile: An Inquiry into Gentile's Conception of Experience' (Pasquale Romanelli, Birnbaum, 1937)
• 'The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile' (H. S. Harris, University of Illinois Press, 1960)
• 'Genesis and Structure of Society' (Giovanni Gentile; H. Harris, University of Illinois Press, 1966)
• 'Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism' (A. James Gregor, Transaction Publishers, 2001) ISBN 0765805936

Further reading in German

• 'Der aktuale Idealismus' (Giovanni Gentile, Mohr Siebeck, 1931) ISBN 3168141410
• 'Die Staatsphilosophie Giovanni Gentiles und die Versuche ihrer Verwirklichung im faschistischen Italien' (Sebastian Schattenfroh, Lang, Peter, GmbH, Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1999) ISBN 3631343450