«Because», as Gentile writes, «the difficulty is not conceiving immortality, but death. Immortality is identity, death is a difference (corruption) ». But, he continues, it is “the very concept of immortality, that is, of life” that “contains a difficulty” in so far as “contains, as its moment, the concept of death. One does not live, he concludes, if not by continually dying ». And this is because “reality is not (of Parmenides’ being), but becomes inasmuch as it is spirit, autochthysis, cause on […]. Hence the immortality not of a reality that is, but of that which becomes. The immortal is not born yet, but is eternally self in the bud. “
The question of immortality, he points out, is not as such a religious question. “Man thinks (or acts) affirming his freedom” and “affirms his immortality, introducing himself into the compact flow of transient things, and stopping time with art, the true […] value, and making one’s eternal being or doing shine in the darkness of things ”. However, one cannot know what immortality is without knowing what death is: it is “ceasing to be”, while “immortality is the attribute of life”. «Death is the abstract, of which the concrete is life: life stiffened in its objectification. We objectify ourselves: and here is the disgust of death. And to objectify is to detach the past from the present ».
The intense pages on death included in Gentile were known Genesis and structure of the company, his latest work; but these unpublished works allow us to understand how and to what extent the problem of death and immortality involved him in a constant, profound and suffered way.
Among many pages worthy of interest, in addition to those on the individual, those on the “impatience of agony and the immortality of the soul” stand out, dating back to his last years, truly extraordinary, as well as for theoretical acuity, for sensitivity they demonstrate.
However paradoxical and cruel as it may be, the death of the dying person is desired, and “the more dear the dying, the more acute this desire”. But this desire comes precisely from love for those who are dying. And it is never love of the body but “of the soul, of that for which man is man, I, self-awareness; and of the body there is love only insofar as the I is incorporated into it ». Therefore, what is desired is not the death of the dying person, but the “life”, the “true life of the dying person”, the life of the soul which the body has “become unable to serve”, having become corrupted. It is the awareness of immortality that gives meaning to the impatience of agony.