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Concept
Actual idealism
Summary
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 G. W. F. Hegel. To Gentile, who considered himself the "philosopher of fascism" while simultaneously describing himself as liberal and socialist, actualism was presented the sole remedy to philosophically preserving free agency, by making the act of thinking self-creative and, therefore, without any contingency and not in the potency of any other fact.
Actual idealism holds that it is the act of thinking as perception, 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, in which 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.
While realists agree that 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.
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.
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