Gioberti, Vincenzo (1801–1852)

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GIOBERTI, VINCENZO
(1801–1852)

Vincenzo Gioberti, the Italian philosopher, ecclesiastical polemicist, and statesman, was born in Turin. As a statesman he upheld federalism as the goal of the movement for Italian unity. Gioberti's Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (Brussels, 1843) is one of the great documents of the Risorgimento. His most famous polemical work is Il gesuita moderno (5 vols., Lausanne, 1846–1847), attacking the allegedly reactionary influence of the Jesuits on church policy. Throughout his intensely active career, philosophy remained his dominant interest. A long political exile (1833–1845) provided the occasion for the composition of his most important philosophical works: Teorica del sovrannaturale (Brussels, 1838), Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (Brussels, 1840), and Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini (Brussels, 1841; 2nd enl. ed., 3 vols., 1843–1844).

"Protologia"

In 1841 and 1842 Gioberti gave a course of lectures (published as Cours de philosophie, Milan, 1947). The second part of these lectures, "Protologie ou science première," was the first sketch of a subject of which many of Gioberti's works can be considered fragmentary studies. The term protologia may derive from the title of a work by Ermenegildo Pini (1739–1825) that was published in 1803. Gioberti envisaged protologia as "the science of the creative act and of the ideal formula which expresses it completely." Its complement is deuterologia, the theory of the sciences constructed by reflection on the basis of being as it is intuited. Protologia has three divisions: theology, logic, and cosmology, which includes psychology. The division arises out of the three elements of the ideal formula, "Being creates the existent." Protologia escapes the subject-object dichotomy; it studies neither the subject nor the object but the intelligible principle that relates the two.

Ontologism

Because of his constant affirmation that being-in-itself is constitutively present to the human intellect, Gioberti's philosophical position is generally described as ontologism. Being is present to the intellect as thought, not as a sensible property of mind itself; that is, the being which is present to the mind is not merely the being of the mind but being itself. Gioberti rejected what he called sensism, by which he meant the view that the being present to the human mind is simply its own being apprehended by the senses. Gioberti asserted that the activity of the human mind "concreates" its object in conjunction with the presence of being. The being constitutively present to the human mind is not merely possible being but real being, and indeed the most real being. This being is indeterminate, not in the sense that it lacks all distinction but in the sense that all distinctions are so related and fused that the human mind does not immediately succeed in discerning them. For this reason the original intuition of being can make known the existent only in conjunction with sensible experience. Sensible experience makes the existent present, but the existent is known by virtue of being. The existent is not, however, a part, determination, or moment of being but a creation of being. Existents are present in being as elements of its creative possibility, not as its modes or qualities (on this point Gioberti thought that he was in disagreement with Benedict Spinoza). The act of thought renders the existent present, and since this act is being and is act only insofar as it is being, it concreates the existent. The act of judgment, which is the pure form of knowledge, has a particular form for thus establishing any particular existent. Its ideal form, or "ideal formula," informs every judgment independently of its particular concern. This ideal formula, "Being creates the existent," is the presence of the pure form of the judgment in its pure possibility.

Language

Ontologism shows that thought is a creative act. The object of thought comes into being through the operation of thought in the word. In this view Gioberti was strongly influenced by Giambattista Vico, and like Vico he studied the problem of language as the general theory of the word. Language is the specific manner in which the concreative operation of thought and being is effected in the human matrix. The concreative act, to be actual and effective, must reflect the human condition—it must be psychologized, but not in the manner which Gioberti opposed as "sensism." Gioberti advocated a transcendent psychologism in which the transcendental operation is the transaction of a concrete existent subject. Language is transcendental in that it reflects the constitutive presence of being in accordance with the structure of the human mind while enabling the mind to transcend its own existential limits and achieve universal significance. In this process of transcendence the ideal formula is specified according to the form not only of the object but also of the subject. Language places knowledge beyond the subject-object split. It reduces the being mentioned in the ideal formula to the effective principle of concrete science.

The transcendental operation of language seems to be widely distributed throughout the numerical range of human subjectivity. Gioberti suggested that it is a transaction of particular groups and ultimately of the nation. This view was important in Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani and was given an aristocratic cast in the claim that within the nation the transcendental operation is the work only of an elite.

"Palingenesis"

Language constitutes the first movement of the life of the spirit, a movement implicit in the ideal formula, "Being creates existence." It is thus at the focus of the genesis of existence and the real as object. The pure form of human thought moves from the immediate givenness of the existent to its ideal ground. In experience we encounter the end product of the movement expressed in the ideal formula. Thought must return the existent thus encountered to its ground in being. Its movement is therefore a palingenesis —a return of existence to being.

Mimesis is the mode of existence of that which is encountered in experience. It is a state, but not a radical or irremediable one, of alienation. Methexis is the state of the thinking subject, the intelligence whose constitutive principle is the intelligible, that is being. Methexis is the link that ends the alienation between being and existence in palingenesis.

Gioberti did not mean by palingenesis a dissolution of the distinctions of existence into the indeterminacy of ideal being. Rather, through palingenesis the being of the existent qua existent (that is, in its distinctness) is ideally grounded in being. Thus, being itself needs the movement of mimesis down into the world in order that it may come into its own actuality, or distinctness, through methexis. Hence, being is not absolutely transcendent. It reaches its actuality in the word and thus belongs inalienably to the region of culture and history. Gioberti's theory of language thus contains in germ a theory of culture and history. Culture and cultures are the historical forms of palingenesis.

Theology, Politics, and Ethics

The palingenesis of being is the central operation of the spirit and determines the actual form of the world. The fact that this one process can be studied from two points of view provided Gioberti with a basis for a correlative distinction and unity of theology and philosophy. Theology possesses a certain superiority deriving chiefly from its object, God. Supernatural theology does not, however, take possession of the internal, or constitutive, word of God; it must make use of analogies drawn from philosophy. Supernatural revelation makes use of the "natural revelation" of the word. Philosophy is therefore superior to theology in that it provides the interpretative categories of theology.

Palingenesis takes on deontological status as the supreme norm of action. In this aspect it is the axiological principle of both the moral and the political orders. In both morals and politics, in conscience and in law, the essential process is the return of existence to being. Similarly, Gioberti held that the church is the historical and institutional form of the palingenesis of being under the dispensation of revelation.

Gioberti's thought is still influential in two of the leading strands of contemporary Italian thought, Gentilean actual idealism and Christian spiritualism.

Bibliography

works by gioberti

Opere edite e inedite di Vincenzo Gioberti. Rome and Milan: F. Bocca, 1938–. Edited by the Istituto di Studi Filosofici. 8 vols. of works and 11 vols of correspondence to date.

Della protologia. Edited by G. Massari, 2 vols. Paris and Turin, 1857.

Nuova protologia. Edited by Giovanni Gentile. Bari: Laterza, 1912.

Scritti scelti di Vincenzo Gioberti. Edited by Augusto Guzzo. Turin, 1954. Contains an important introduction.

Saitta, Armando, Andrea Luigi Mazzini, and Vincenzo Gioberti. Sinistra hegeliana e problema italiano negli scritti di A.L. Mazzini. Rome: Istituto italiano per l'età moderna e contemporanea, 1968.