The first original formulation of Abbagnano’ s thought (after the young attempts to contrast idealism of Croce and Gentile through the claim of “Irrational sources of thought” or the revaluation of the philosophic importance of scientific knowledge) is tightly connected to introduction of philosophy of existence in the Italian philosophic culture, as it was getting defined during the thirty above all between Turin and Milan and to the discussion that, about it, it developed before and after the war.
In 1939, Abbagnano published “The structure of existence”, a book that –as Norberto Bobbio wrote thirty years later- “Does not seem to any of philosophic works wrote at that time, even in the shape that was rough, linear, without the usual dialectical virtuosity”, a “not easy” book, but “as it was written vigorously, guided and supported by a rare mental discipline, it was easy to understand it”.
Abbagnano, as Heidegger and Jaspers did, considered philosophy as a research of being and this research can be leaded asking the man, that is define in his existence by the possibility of place to himself the problem of being, that means “in the effort toward the being”.
Abbagnano used to distinguish his own philosophic position from the one of the greatest German exponent of philosophy of existence, and above all he used to keep apart from the negative conclusion that, it seemed to him, they reached.
Accordingly to Abbagnano, Heidegger considers the effort toward the being “respect to his starting point”, that means respect to the initial situation, so that “the existence appears as an exist from nothing”, and the nothing becomes “the element that allow to define the existence and to place it in the authentic nature”.
Jaspers, on the other hand, considers the effort toward the being “respect to his final situation”, considering the being “above the effort that moves towards it” and that means as transcendence, not obtainable with research.
The conclusion is that the research of being becomes in the first case “anguish”, in the second “checkmate”.
So that, Abbagnano was refusing from one side the identification of Heidegger about authentic existence with the “living for the death”, from the other side the thought of Jaspers of a not obtaining being by the man, towards whom the philosophy tends without reaching it and, even less, objectifying it.
Against the existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers, he used to place a position “the final situation of effort towards the being realizes its own essential unity with the final situation”, and to characterize this unity he used to return to the notion of structure as it was enunciated by Dilthey.
The existence has its own structure, but this is not given to the man; it presents itself as a chance to realize.
Actually, existence can be built as a chance, and it finds its foundation in the chance of the chance, that means in the transcendental chance.
Therefore Abbagnano used to propose –against Heidegger and Jaspers, and later even against the Sartre “de l’ etre et le neant”- a “positive” existentialism turned to underline the problematic of the existence and commitment of the man.
In this context, the notion of freedom achieves a central position together with the notion of choice.
The man is define, according to Abbagnano, by the chance of choosing between the chances given, to realize some of them and not others –and in that it appears the transcendental chance.
The man can choose between authentic existence and inauthentic existence, between the faithfulness to himself being and the dispersion of the daily.
The chance of choice, that Abbagnano is talking about, was achieving a normative meaning, that, instead, Heidegger excluded “the norm is the must to be of the freedom as transcendence”, a must to be that coincide with the must to arrive at the realization of himself structure.
Against idealism, against the dissolution of the individual in the process of realization of the infinite spirit (Croce) or in the pure act of thought (Gentile), Abbagnano claimed the finish of the man, his temporality, his freedom of choosing between the given chances by the situation in which he is, the moral value of this choice.
In the after works of “the structure of existence”, that means in “the introduction to the existentialism and in the essays of “philosophy religion science” and of “positive existentialism”, he used to reach to the recognition of main problematic character, not just about the existence of the man, but of any reality: philosophy itself is, for him, “a knowledge or a problematic reason”.
The “finite” reason, aware of finish of the man and his relationship with a world itself problematic, too, was, in this way, opposed to the reason “justification” according to Hegel.
On this basis, Abbagnano used to define the relationship of philosophy from one side with religion, from the other side with science.
The philosophy point out to the man the way of the research, the religion the one of believe.
As far as it concerns the relationship with science, he is determined by the fact that philosophy is not knowledge, can not wish to offer to the results of knowledge a metaphysic integration: the science exhausts the field of what can be known and the philosophy has not a different way of access to scientific knowledge.
On the contrary, philosophy is the “commitment” that man undertakes as it is himself existence.
This definition of philosophy and its relationship with science, constitute the starting point of “new-Enlightenment” phase of the thought of Abbagnano, inaugurated by the presence –together with Bobbio and Ludovico Geymonat, but even with mathematics, physics, engineers- to the discussions of centre of methodical studies.
Since 1934, Abbagnano dedicated a volume to “the new physic”, examining the theory of relativity, the quantum theory and indeterminate principle of Heisenberg and searching to propose the philosophic meaning.
After ’45, while he was starting to come apart from existentialism, the interest for science returned in a central position in his thought.
Against the pragmatic or conventional interpretations of science, Abbagnano grabbed the value of knowledge, or even the character of valid knowledge.
Just the science allows “to put on order” and therefore to know the world; the philosophy does not constitute a shape of knowledge different or in alternative to science, but it is rather reflection on itself, it is gnoseological or epistemological inquiry.
Meanwhile, Abbagnano used to propose an interpretation of scientific knowledge that wanted to rescue it from the determinism of the nineteenth-century science and, particularly, to the category of necessity, that the classical positivism had in common with the romantic metaphysics.
On this field, he could pick up from the notion of possibility that he formulate in the existentialistic period.
If the nineteenth-century science followed the idea of a causal concatenation of facts, that was possible to express in a system of necessary laws, the contemporary science, instead, is looking for relations of conditioning.
This is valid not just for physic, but even, and above all, for social science.
Particularly on field of sociology, that idealistic culture used to consider as a “not real science”, Abbagnano gave an important contribution: recognizing sociality as a very important dimention for human beings.
For a man, it is essential the relation with others and, therefore, the chance to communicate: this important task is related to sociology.
The “new-Enlightenment” phase of his thought opens in 1948 with the article “towards a new Enlightenment” that, in the pragmatism of Dewey and new positivism, used to find a common inspiration to positive idealism that considered the reason “what it is, a human strength that makes the world more human”.
From that a program to transform the reality as rational, in the name of a “limited” reason, but not for that powerless.
This phase ended in 1961 with the issue of “Dictionary of philosophy”.
After that, Abbagnano started to point out the problems of the day by day existence and about a conception of philosophy as a “wisdom”, typical of Platone (one of his favourite philosopher).
Facing a fail of new-Enlightenment, in a cultural environment that was experiencing the success of Marxism that was picking up the heritage of idealism, the Abbagnano’ s thought was talking to the common people.
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