«Il mio corpo limitato e lo spirito infinito»

Feeling, Corporeality and Space in Rosmini and Gentile

Abstract

In Rosmini’s thought, the doctrine of ‘fundamental feeling’ goes through a development process from the Nuovo Saggio to the Antropologia, until it takes definitive form in the Psicologia. The relation of the sentient body to space becomes indicative of an infinite – or transcendental – openness of feeling, prefiguring an unprecedented conception of the human soul, and its substantiality, as the ‘conscious center of experience’. With Spaventa, but especially with Gentile, Italian idealism takes advantage of this conception, while placing it in a speculative context in which ‘substance’, or the permanence of experience, acquires another meaning.