This book is a welcome contribution to contemporary moral philosophy, albeit with some limitations. While most philosophers working on constructivism in metaethics are working from a Kantian perspective (like Rawls, Scanlon, O’Neill, Korsgaard, etc.), with growing interest in constructivism from Aristotelians and Humeans, this book attempts both to probe the insights into the nature of normativity of the early twentieth-century idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, and to relate it to contemporary debates about constructivism. Wakefield thus tries to reconstruct elements of Gentile’s practical philosophy as well as to relate this reconstructed version of Gentile’s thought to contemporary constructivists like O’Neill and Korsgaard.
Wakefield only partially manages to achieve both goals, lacking somewhat in thoroughness with regard to the historical and argumentative aspects of the book. However, the book points to a very interesting, and in this reviewer’s opinion important, avenue for further investigation of metaethical constructivism in post-Kantian idealism.
In the introduction, Wakefield defines what notion of ‘constructivism’ is operative throughout the book, drawing mostly on the notion developed first by Rawls in his remarks on Kant in his Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory (1980) and in subsequent elaborations by O’Neill and Korsgaard, and introduces Giovanni Gentile as a historical figure. Gentile was an influential figure in early twentieth-century Italian philosophy, representing one strand within the idealist tradition in that country, who also later in life became an active supporter of Mussolini’s fascist regime. The introduction serves to underscore the multiple purposes of the reconstruction: to recover those parts of Gentile’s thought uncontaminated by his involvement with the fascist regime, and to compare this reconstruction to contemporary constructivism in moral theory.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with Gentile’s philosophy, first outlining Gentile’s considerations on philosophical methodology and epistemology, followed by his theory of the ethical person and his theory of the ethico-political community. Gentile is an idealist, following other philosophers like Descartes, Kant and Hegel in being primarily a philosopher of subjectivity, distinguished in particular by his ‘method of immanence’ and the notion of pensiero pensante, or ‘thought thinking’. This latter notion underscores that constructivist notions permeate his philosophy as a whole.
Gentile’s philosophy, called ‘actual idealism’, as a constructivism, is methodologically constituted by ‘an attempt to describe reality in phenomenological terms without relying upon unjustified presuppositions or descending into mysticism’ (p. 29). Wakefield traces Gentile’s systematic development of this thought throughout chapter 2 to arrive at a quasi-Hegelian notion of absolute subjectivity, which constructs truth out of the coherence of a set of beliefs. Wakefield illustrates this development through Gentile’s own criticisms of the history of philosophy, noting for example that both scholastic philosophy and Cartesianism (despite identifying the cogito argument as essentially correct) fail on questions of justification by reference to divine faith as the guarantor of knowledge. While such an exposition is helpful in situating Gentile’s own thought, it leaves one wondering whether the distortions of philosophical positions are due to Gentile’s own, selective appraisal of the history of philosophy, or whether it is due to the reconstructive presentation of Gentile’s philosophy.
Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of the person developed in Gentile and is most concerned with defending Gentilean constructivism from lapsing into solipsism. Given the conception of subjectivity that Gentile works with, it seems prima facie problematic why it does not just lapse into solipsism or relativism. Wakefield refers to the latter in the ‘Conditionality Objection’, which arises immediately after one has dealt with solipsism and then asks whether a person can be rationally compelled by universally binding norms that are yet not constructed and endorsed by the person. The paradox here is that, while Gentile to a certain extent endorses both solipsism and some version of relativism (insofar as subjects must rationally assent to whatever norm they want to be bound by), he blocks being pigeonholed by either position by maintaining a radically anti-sceptical position which allows for a ‘deceptively ordinary’ (p. 69) conception of the person. We are also introduced to the model of moral reasoning which is supposed to explain how Gentile’s constructivism arrives at universally valid moral claims without any unjustified presuppositions. It is an internal dialogue (referred to as ‘internalized dialogue procedure’, or IDP), where subjects take on a particular position, and then attempt to justify it as if they were in dialogue with some supposed other. This builds a social component into the notion of subjectivity without having to presuppose any historical form to the kind of social relationship that the subject has to its imagined other.
Chapter 4 deals with Gentile’s theory of the state. Wakefield notes that Gentile is often liable to conflate spiritual and political dimensions of the state, which a fidelity to his ethical theory ought to keep distinct. This chapter examines Gentile’s criticism of Hegel’s conception of the state and his original development of a philosophy of right/law. Here the notion of the subject is expanded upon, and Wakefield rightly criticizes Gentile’s overemphasis of the role that ‘interiority’ plays in characterizing the subject as not only social, but also political. Thus Gentile’s political conception of the state is jettisoned, because it either involves an endless regress, or because it relies on authoritarianism to avoid the regress. To extricate Gentile from his enthusiasm for fascism, only the spiritual conception of the state is retained as the ethical core of the social subject.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 turn from the systematic elaborations of elementary concepts of Gentile’s constructivism to contrasts with contemporary Kantian constructivists like O’Neill and Korsgaard, as well as applications to moral education and a model of norm-construction based on the notion of internal dialogue from Chapter 3.
Chapter 5 deals with practical reason and is mainly concerned with contrasting Kant’s Categorical Imperative with O’Neill’s arguments for constructivism. Here IDP is more rigorously described, with helpful diagrams, and is contrasted first with other ideal observer theories, then with the Categorical Imperative. While similarities are noted, Gentile’s IDP distinguishes itself from Kantian moral theory by including more of the subject’s inherent sociality. This chapter suffers to some extent from casting too critical a light on Kantian constructivism. While Gentile’s and Kant’s theories are not the same, Wakefield very often overstates the differences – although similar things can often be said about other philosophers’ uncharitable interpretations of Kant.
Chapter 6 starts off by generalizing from a problem about how IDP is supposed to generate values and principles for action for a single subject to how this may work inter-subjectively. For such a procedure to generate objectively binding moral principles, one almost has to presuppose what these principles, or values, are; this goes against both its supposedly non-question-begging character, as well as the spirit of autonomy that IDP initially espouses. Wakefield points out here that the initial problem is one that besets other constructivists as well, for example Korsgaard’s appeal to the contingent identity of a subject as being both given and constructed, and offers ways out of this dilemma.
Chapter 7 gives an illustration of how the IDP is supposed to work in a given situation, and so how it models human moral reasoning in terms of its reliance upon an internalized dialogue, thus constructing the idea of the ethical other within an absolute subjectivity to arrive at universally valid moral principles. Wakefield reaffirms the antirealist dimension of the dialogical procedure, along with its open-ended structure. It would have been helpful if Wakefield had framed this discussion in terms of both the Kantian notion of heteronomy and the notion of moral reasoning as fallibilistic, since this would have driven the point home more directly than appealing to antirealism as well as emphasizing the ‘non-prejudged’ character of what the procedure is supposed to yield.
This book makes it clear that one can read Gentile in line with contemporary constructivists, and that his own engagement with Kantian and Hegelian idealism gives the historical background for alternatives to the preponderance of constructivism grounded almost exclusively on Kantian considerations. It is also very clear at times in identifying the purport of constructivism as a rigorous, non-question-begging procedure for moral justification. Whether Gentile can be saved from his association with fascism is however less clear, since he did not suddenly convert to fascism on a whim or because of some shrewd calculation. In 1911 he already supported Italy’s colonial venture in Libya. In addition, the persistent issue of voluntarism in Wakefield’s exegesis does make it questionable whether Gentile actually can live up to the attribution of constructivism. He could be identified as a constructivist, at which point one would have to show whether or not his theory can deal with this particular issue. Or the identification with constructivism is erroneous and Gentile is actually much closer to C. Schmitt (who is briefly mentioned in the book), who also identified the formal problems of moral justification only to then explicitly opt for voluntarism.
