PHILOSOPHY OF THE
PRACTICAL
ECONOMIC AND ETHIC
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF
BENEDETTO CROCE
BY
DOUGLAS AINSLIE
B.A. (OXON.), M.R.A.S.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1913
Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit, in the English translation by Douglas Ainslie, consists of 4 volumes (which can be read separately):
1. Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic. (Second augmented edition. A first ed. is also available at Project Gutenberg.)
2. Philosophy of the practical: economic and ethic.
3. Logic as the science of the pure concept.
4. Theory and history of historiography.
Transcriber's note.
[NOTE]
Certain chapters only of the third part of this book were anticipated in the study entitled Reduction of the Philosophy of Law to the Philosophy of Economy, read before the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples at the sessions of April 21 and May 5, 1907 (Acts, vol. xxxvii.); but I have remodelled them, amplifying certain pages and summarizing others. The concept of economic activity as an autonomous form of the spirit, which receives systematic treatment in the second part of the book, was first maintained in certain essays, composed from 1897 to 1900, and afterwards collected in the volume Historical Materialism and Marxist Economy (2nd edition, Palermo, Sandron, 1907).
B. C.
NAPLES,
19th April 1908.
[TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE]
"A noi sembra che l' opera del Croce sia lo sforzo più potente che il pensiero italiano abbia compiuto negli ultimi anni."—G. de Ruggiero in La Filosofia contemporanea, 1912.
"Il sistema di Benedetto Croce rimane la più alta conquista del pensiero contemporaneo."—G. Natoli in La Voce, 19th December 1912.
Those acquainted with my translation of Benedetto Croce's Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic will not need to be informed of the importance of this philosopher's thought, potent in its influence upon criticism, upon philosophy and upon life, and famous throughout Europe.
In the Italian, this volume is the third and last of the Philosophy of the Spirit, Logic as Science of the Pure Concept coming second in date of publication. But apart from the fact that philosophy is like a moving circle, which can be entered equally well at any point, I have preferred to place this volume before the Logic in the hands of British readers. Great Britain has long been a country where moral values are highly esteemed; we are indeed experts in the practice, though perhaps not in the theory of morality, a lacuna which I believe this book will fill.
In saying that we are experts in moral practice I do not, of course, refer to the narrow conventional morality, also common with us, which so often degenerates into hypocrisy, a legacy of Puritan origin; but apart from this, there has long existed in many millions of Britons a strong desire to live well, or, as they put it, cleanly and rightly, and achieved by many, independent of any close or profound examination of the logical foundation of this desire. Theology has for some taken the place of pure thought, while for others, early training on religious lines has been sufficiently strong to dominate other tendencies in practical life. Yet, as a speculative Scotsman, I am proud to think that we can claim divided honours with Germany in the production of Emmanuel Kant (or Cant).
The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed with us a great development of materialism in its various forms. The psychological, anti-historical speculation contained in the so-called Synthetic Philosophy (really psychology) of Herbert Spencer was but one of the many powerful influences abroad, tending to divert youthful minds from the true path of knowledge. This writer, indeed, made himself notorious by his attitude of contemptuous intolerance and ignorance of the work previously done in connection with subjects which he was investigating. He accepted little but the evidence of his own senses and judgment, as though he were the first philosopher. But time has now taken its revenge, and modern criticism has exposed the Synthetic Philosophy in all its barren and rigid inadequacy and ineffectuality. Spencer tries to force Life into a brass bottle of his own making, but the genius will not go into his bottle. The names and writings of J. S. Mill, of Huxley, and of Bain are, with many others of lesser calibre, a potent aid to the dissolving influence of Spencer. Thanks to their efforts, the spirit of man was lost sight of so completely that I can well remember hearing Kant's great discovery of the synthesis a priori described as moonshine, and Kant himself, with his categoric imperative, as little better than a Prussian policeman. As for Hegel, the great completer and developer of Kantian thought, his philosophy was generally in even less esteem among the youth; and we find even the contemplative Walter Pater passing him by with a polite apology for shrinking from his chilly heights. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that estimable Kantians and Hegelians did not exist here and there throughout the kingdom in late Victorian days (the names of Stirling, of Caird, and of Green at once occur to the mind); but they had not sufficient genius to make their voices heard above the hubbub of the laboratory. We all believed that the natural scientists had taken the measure of the universe, could tot it up to a T—and consequently turned a deaf ear to other appeals.
Elsewhere in Europe Hartmann, Haeckel, and others were busy measuring the imagination and putting fancy into the melting-pot—they offered us the chemical equivalent of the wings of Aurora. We believed them, believed those materialists, those treacherous neo-Kantians, perverters of their master's doctrine, who waited for guileless youth with mask and rapier at the corner of every thicket. Such as escaped this ambush were indeed fortunate if they shook themselves free of Schopenhauer, the (personally) comfortable philosopher of suicide and despair, and fell into the arms of the last and least of the Teutonic giants, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose spasmodic paragraphs, full of genius but often empty of philosophy, show him to have been far more of a poet than a philosopher. It was indeed a doleful period of transition for those unfortunate enough to have been born into it: we really did believe that life had little or nothing to offer, or that we were all Overmen (a mutually exclusive proposition!), and had only to assert ourselves in order to prove it.
To the writings of Pater I have already referred, and of them it may justly be said that they are often supremely beautiful, with the quality and cadence of great verse, but mostly (save perhaps the volume on Plato and Platonism, by which he told the present writer that he hoped to live) instinct with a profound scepticism, that revelled in the externals of Roman Catholicism, but refrained from crossing the threshold which leads to the penetralia of the creed.
Ruskin also we knew, and he too has a beautiful and fresh vein of poetry, particularly where free from irrational dogmatism upon Ethic and Æsthetic. But we found him far inferior to Pater in depth and suggestiveness, and almost devoid of theoretical capacity. Sesame for all its Lilies is no Open Sesame to the secrets of the world. Thus, wandering in the obscure forest, it is little to be wondered that we did not anticipate the flood of light to be shed upon us as we crossed the threshold of the twentieth century.
It was an accident that took me to Naples in 1909, and the accident of reading a number of La Critica, as I have described in the introduction to the Æsthetic, that brought me in contact with the thought of Benedetto Croce. But it was not only the Æsthetic, it was also the purely critical work of the philosopher that appeared to me at once of so great importance. To read Hegel, for instance, after reading Croce's study of him, is a very different experience (at least so I found it) to reading him before so doing.
Hegel is an author most deeply stimulative and suggestive, but any beginner is well to take advantage of all possible aid in the difficult study.
To bring this thought of Hegel within the focus of the ordinary mind has never been an easy task (I know of no one else who has successfully accomplished it); and Croce's work, What is living and what is dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, as one may render the Italian title of the book which I hope to translate, has enormously aided a just comprehension, both of the qualities and the defects of that philosopher. This work appeared in the Italian not long after the Æsthetic, and has had an influence upon the minds of contemporary Italians, second only to the Philosophy of the Spirit. To clear away the débris of Hegel, his false conception of art and of religion, to demonstrate his erroneous application of his own great discovery of the dialectic to pseudo-concepts, and thus to reveal it in its full splendour, has been one of the most valuable of Croce's inestimable contributions to critical thought.
I shall not pause here to dilate upon the immense achievement of Croce, the youngest of Italian senators, a recognition of his achievement by his King and country, but merely mention his numerous historical works, his illuminative study of Vico, which has at last revealed that philosopher as of like intellectual stature to Kant; the immense tonic and cultural influence of his review, La Critica, and his general editorship of the great collection of Scrittori d' Italia. Freed at last from that hubbub of the laboratory, from the measures and microscopes of the natural scientists, excellent in their place, it is interesting to ask if any other contemporary philosopher has made a contribution to ethical theory in any way comparable to the Philosophy of the Practical. The names of Bergson and of Blondel at once occur to the mind, but the former admits that his complete ideas on ethics are not yet made known, and implies that he may never make them entirely known. The reader of the Philosophy of the Practical will, I think, find that none of Bergson's explanations, "burdened," as he says, with "geometry," and as we may say with matter, from the obsession of which he never seems to shake himself altogether free, are comparable in depth or lucidity with the present treatise. The spirit is described by Bergson as memory, and matter as a succession of images. How does the one communicate with the other? The formula of the self-creative life process seems hardly sufficient to explain this, for if with Bergson we conceive of life as a torrent, there must be some reason why it should flow rather in one channel than in another. But life is supposed to create and to absorb matter in its progress; and here we seem to have entered a vicious circle, for the intuition presupposes, it does not create its object. As regards the will, too, the Bergsonian theory of the Ego as rarely (sometimes never once in life) fully manifesting itself, and our minor actions as under the control of matter, seems to lead to a deterministic conception and to be at variance with the thesis of the self-creation of life.
As regards Blondel, the identification of thought and will in the philosophy of action leads him to the position that the infinite is not in the universal abstract, but in the single concrete. It is through matter that the divine truth reaches us, and God must pass through nature or matter, in order to reach us, and we must effect the contrary process to reach God. It is a beautiful conception; but, as de Ruggiero suggests, do we not thus return, by a devious and difficult path, to the pre-Hegelian, pre-Kantian, position of religious platonicism?[1]
This, however, is not the place to discourse at length of other philosophies. What most impresses in the Crocean thought is its profundity, its clarity, and its completeness,—totus teres atque rotundus. Croce, indeed, alone of the brilliant army of philosophers and critics arisen in the new century, has found a complete formula for his thought, complete, that is, at a certain stage; for, as he says, the relative nature of all systems is apparent to all who have studied philosophy. He alone has defined and allocated the activities of the human spirit; he alone has plumbed and charted its ocean in all its depth and breadth.
A system! The word will sound a mere tinkling of cymbals to many still aground in the abstract superficialities of nineteenth-century scepticism; but they are altogether mistaken. To construct a system is like building a house: it requires a good architect to build a good house, and where it is required to build a great palace it requires a great genius to build it successfully. Michael Angelo built the Vatican, welding together and condensing the works of many predecessors, ruthlessly eliminating what they contained of bad or of erroneous: Benedetto Croce has built the Philosophy of the Spirit. To say of either achievement that it will not last for ever, or that it will need repair from time to time, is perfectly true; but this criticism applies to all things human; and yet men continue to build houses—for God and for themselves. Croce is the first to admit the incompleteness, the lack of finality of all philosophical systems, for each one of them deals, as he says, with a certain group of problems only, which present themselves at a definite period of time. The solution of these leads to the posing of new problems, first caught sight of by the philosopher as he terminates his labours, to be solved by the same or by other thinkers.
And here it may be well to state very briefly the basis on which rests the Philosophy of the Spirit, without attempting to do anything more than to give its general outline. The reader should imagine himself standing, like bold Pizarro, on his "peak of Darien," surveying at a great distance the vast outline of a New World, which yet is as old as Asia.
The Spirit is Reality, it is the whole of Reality, and it has two forms: the theoretic and the practical activities. Beyond or outside these there are no other forms of any kind. The theoretic activity has two forms, the intuitive and individual, and the intellectual or knowledge of the universal: the first of these produces images and is known as Æsthetic, the second concepts and is known as Logic. The first of these activities is altogether independent, self-sufficient, autonomous: the second, on the other hand, has need of the first, ere it can exist. Their relation is therefore that of double degree. The practical activity is the will, which is thought in activity, and this also has two forms, the economic or utilitarian, and the ethical or moral, the first autonomous and individual, the second universal, and this latter depends upon the first for its existence, in a manner analogous to Logic and to Æsthetic.
With the theoretic activity, man understands the universe, with the practical, he changes it. There are no grades or degrees of the Spirit beyond these. All other forms are either without activity, or they are verbal variants of the above, or they are a mixture of these four in different proportions.
Thus the Philosophy of the Spirit is divided into Æsthetic, Logic, and Philosophy of the Practical (Economic and Ethic). In these it is complete, and embraces the whole of human activity.
The discussion of determinism or free will is of course much more elaborated here than in the Æsthetic, where exigencies of space compelled the philosopher to offer it in a condensed form. His solution that the will is and must be free, but that it contains two moments, the first conditioned, and that the problem should be first stated in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, seems to be the only one consonant with facts. The conclusion that the will is autonomous and that therefore we can never be obliged to do anything against our will may seem to be paradoxical, until the overwhelming argument in proof of this has been here carefully studied.
Croce's division of the practical activity into the two grades of Economic and Ethic, to which Kant did not attain and Fichte failed fully to perceive, has for the first time rendered comprehensible much that was hitherto obscure in ancient history and contemporary history. The "merely economic man" will be recognised by all students of the Philosophy of the Practical, where his characteristics are pointed out by the philosopher; and a few years hence, when Croce's philosophy will have filtered through fiction and journalism to the level of the general public, the phrase will be as common as is the "merely economic" person to-day.
For indeed, all really new and great discoveries come from the philosophers, gradually filtering down through technical treatises and reviews, until they reach the level of prose fiction and of poetry, which, since the Æsthetic, we know to be one and the same thing with different empirical manifestations. In truth, the philosophers alone go deeply enough into the essence of things to reach their roots. Thus some philosophy, generally in an extremely diluted form, becomes part of every one's mental furniture and thus the world makes progress and the general level of culture is raised. Thought is democratic in being open to all, aristocratic in being attained only by the few—and that is the only true aristocracy: to be on the same level as the best.
Another discovery of Croce's, set forth in this volume for the first time in all the plenitude of its richness, is the theory of Error. The proof of the practical nature of error, of its necessity, and of the fact that we only err because we will to do so, is a marvel of acute and profound analysis. Readers unaccustomed to the dialectic may not at first be prepared to admit the necessary forms of error, that error is not distinct, but opposed to truth and as such its simple dialectic negation, and that truth is thought of truth, which develops by conquering error, which must always exist in every problem. The full understanding of the Crocean theory of error throws a flood of light on all philosophical problems, and has already formed the basis of at least one brilliant study of contemporary philosophy.
To the reduction of the concept of law to an economic factor, which depends upon the priority and autonomy of Economic in relation to Ethic, is devoted a considerable portion of the latter part of the Philosophy of the Practical, and it is easy to see that an elaborate treatment of this problem was necessary, owing to the confusion as to its true nature that has for so long existed in the minds of thinkers, owing to their failure to grasp the above distinction. In Great Britain indeed, where precedent counts for so much in law, the ethical element is very often so closely attached as to be practically indistinguishable from it, save by the light of the Crocean analysis. In the Logic as Science of the Pure Concept will be found much to throw light upon the Philosophy of the Practical, where the foreshortening of certain proofs (due to concentration upon other problems) may appear to leave loopholes to objection. Thought will there be found to make use of language for expression, though not itself language; and it will be found useless to seek logic in words, which in themselves are always æsthetic. For there is a duality between intuition and concept, which form the two grades or degrees of theoretic knowledge, as described also in the Æsthetic. There are two types of concept, the pure and the false or pseudo-concept, as Croce calls it. This latter is also divided into two types of representation—those that are concrete without being universal (such as the cat, the rose), and those that are without a content that can be represented, or universal without being concrete, since they never exist in reality (such are the triangle, free motion). The first of these are called empirical pseudo-concepts, the second abstract pseudo-concepts: the first are represented by the natural, the second by the mathematical sciences.
Of the pure concept it is predicated that it is ineliminable, for while the pseudo-concepts in their multiplicity are abolished by thought as it proceeds, there will always remain one thought namely, that which thinks their abolition. This concept is opposed to the pseudo-concepts: it is ultra or omni-representative. I shall content myself with this brief mention of the contents of the Philosophy of the Practical and of the Logic upon which I am now working.
Since the publication of Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, there has been some movement in the direction of the study of Italian thought and culture, which I advocated in the Introduction to that work. But the Alps continue to be a barrier, and the thought of France and of Germany reaches us, as a rule, far more rapidly than that of the home of all the arts and of civilization, as we may call that Italy which contains within it the classical Greater Greece. A striking instance of this relatively more rapid distribution of French thought is afforded by the celebrated Lundis of Sainte-Beuve, so familiar to many readers; yet a critic, greater in depth than Sainte-Beuve, was writing at the same period—greater in philosophical vision of the relations of things, for the vision of Sainte-Beuve rarely rose above the psychological plane. For one reader acquainted with the History of Italian Literature of De Sanctis, a hundred are familiar with the Lundis of Sainte-Beuve.
At the present moment the hegemony of philosophical thought may be said to be divided between Italy and France, for neither Great Britain nor Germany has produced a philosophical mind of the first order. The interest in Continental idealism is becoming yearly more keen, since the publication of Bergson's and of Blondel's treatises, and of Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit. Mr. Arthur Balfour, being himself a philosopher, was one of the first to recognise the importance of the latter work, referring to its author in terms of high praise in his oration on Art delivered at Oxford in the Sheldonian Theatre. Mr. Saintsbury also has expressed his belief that with the Æsthetic Croce has provided the first instrument for scientific (i.e. philosophical, not "natural" scientific) criticism of literature. This surely is well, and should lead to an era of more careful and less impartial, of more accurate because more scientific criticism of our art and poetry.
I trust that a similar service may be rendered to Ethical theory and practice by the publication of the present translation, which I believe to be rich with great truths of the first importance to humanity, here clearly and explicitly stated for the first time and therefore (in Vico's sense of the word) "created," by his equal and compatriot, Benedetto Croce.
Then leaning upon the arm of time came Truth, whose radiant face,
Though never so late to the feast she go, hath aye the foremost place.
DOUGLAS AINSLIE.
ATHENAEUM CLUB, PALL MALL,
January 1913.
[1] G. de Ruggiero, La Filosofia contemporanea, Laterza, Bari, 1912.
[CONTENTS]
FIRST PART
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL
FIRST SECTION
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS
[I] 3
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT
Practical and theoretic life—Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions —Insufficiency of the psychological method in philosophy—Necessity of the philosophical method—Constatation and deduction—Theories which deny the practical form of the spirit—The practical as an unconscious fact: critique—Nature and practical activity—Reduction of the practical form to the theoretical: critique—The practical as thought in action—Recognition of its autonomy.
[II] 21
NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING
The practical and the so-called third spiritual form: feeling—Various meanings of the word: feeling, a psychological class—Feeling as a state of the spirit—Function of the concept of feeling in the History of philosophy: the indeterminate—Feeling as forerunner of the æsthetic form—In Historic: preannouncement of the intuitive element—In philosophical Logic: pre-announcement of the pure concept—Analogous function in the Philosophy of the practical—Negation of feeling—Deductive exclusion of it.
[III] 33
RELATION OF THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY WITH THE THEORETICAL
Precedence of the theoretical over the practical—The unity of the spirit and the co-presence of the practical—Critique of pragmatism—Critique of psychological objections—Nature of theoretic precedence over the practical: historical knowledge—Its continual mutability—No other theoretic precedent—Critique of practical concepts and judgments—Posteriority of judgments to the practical act—Posteriority of practical concepts—Origin of intellectualistic and sentimentalistic doctrines—The concepts of end and means—Critique of the end as plan or fixed design—Volition and the unknown—Critique of the concept of practical sciences and of a practical Philosophy.
[IV] 53
INSEPARABILITY OF ACTION FROM ITS REAL BASE AND PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE THEORETIC ERROR
Coincidence of intention and volition—Volition in the abstract and in the concrete: critique—Volition thought and real volition: critique—Critique of volition with unknown or ill-known base —Illusions in the instances adduced—Impossibility of volition with erroneous theoretical base—Forms of the theoretic error and problem as to its nature—Distinction between ignorance and error: practical origin of latter—Confirmations and proofs—Justification of the practical repression of error—Empirical distinctions of errors and the philosophic distinction.
[V] 73
IDENTITY OF VOLITION AND ACTION AND DISTINCTION BETWEEN VOLITION AND EVENT
Volition and action: intuition and expression—Spirit and nature—Inexistence of volitions without action and inversely—Illusions as to the distinctions between these terms—Distinction between action and succession or event—Volition and event—Successful and unsuccessful actions: critique—Acting and foreseeing: critique—Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action from success—Explanation of facts that seem to be at variance.
[VI] 86
THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL
Practical taste and judgment—Practical judgment as historical judgment—Its Logic—Importance of the practical judgment—Difference between practical judgment and judgment of event—Progress in action and progress in Reality—Precedence of the Philosophy of the practical over the practical judgment—Confirmation of the philosophic incapacity of the psychological method.
[VII] 103
PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION, RULES AND CASUISTIC
Justification of the psychological method and of empirical and descriptive disciplines—Practical Description and its literature —Extension of practical description—Normative knowledge or rules: their nature—Utility of rules—The literature of rules and its apparent decadence—Relation between the arts (collections of rules) and philosophic doctrines—Casuistic: its nature and utility—Jurisprudence as casuistic.
[VIII] 121
CRITIQUE OF THE INVASIONS OF PHILOSOPHY INTO PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION AND INTO ITS DERIVATIVES
First form: tendency to generalize—Historical elements that persist in the generalizations—Second form: literary union of philosophy and empiria—Third form: attempt to put them in close connection—Science of the practical, and Metaphysic: various meanings—Injurious consequences of the invasions—1st, Dissolution of empirical concepts—Examples: war and peace, property and communism, and the like—Other examples—Misunderstandings on the part of the philosophers—Historical significance of such questions—2nd, False deduction of the empirical from the philosophic—Affirmations as to the contingent changed into philosophemes—Reasons for the rebellion against rules—Limits between philosophy and empiria.
[IX] 144
HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Distinction between history of the practical principle and history of liberation from the transcendental—II. Distinction of the practical from the theoretical—III. Minglings of the Philosophy of the practical with Description—Vain attempts at a definition of empirical concepts—Attempts at deduction—IV. Various questions—Practical nature of error—Practical taste—V. Doctrines of feeling—The Wolfians—Jacobi and Schleiermacher—Kant—Hegel—Opponents of the doctrine of the three faculties. Krug—Brentano.
SECOND SECTION
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS DIALECTIC
[I] 173
NECESSITY AND FREEDOM IN THE VOLITIONAL ACT
The problem of freedom—Freedom of willing and freedom of action: critique of such distinction—The volitional act, both necessary and free—Comparison with the æsthetic activity—Critique of determinism and arbitrarism—General form of this antithesis: materialism and mysticism—Materialistic sophisms of determinism—Mysticism of doctrine of free will—Doctrine of necessity-liberty and idealism—Doctrine of double causality; of dualism and agnosticism—Its character of transaction and transition.
[II] 192
FREEDOM AND ITS OPPOSITE. GOOD AND EVIL
Freedom of action as reality of action—Inconceivability of the absolute absence of action—Non-freedom as antithesis and contrariety—Nothingness and arbitrariness of non-liberty—Good as freedom and reality, and evil as its opposite—Critique of abstract monism and of dualism of values—Objections to the irreality of evil—Evil in synthesis and out of synthesis—Affirmative judgments of evil as negative judgments—Confirmations of the doctrine—The poles of feeling (pleasure and pain); and their identity with the practical opposites—Doctrine relating to pleasure and happiness: critique—Empirical concepts relating to good and evil—To have to be, ideal, inhibitive, imperative power—Evil, remorse, etc.; good, satisfaction, etc.—Their incapacity for serving as practical principles—Their character.
[III] 215
THE VOLITIONAL ACT AND THE PASSIONS
The multiplicity of volitions and the struggle for unity—Multiplicity and unity as good and evil—Excluded volitions and passions or desires—Passions and desires as possible volitions—Volition as struggle with the passions—Critique of the freedom of choice—Meaning of the so-called precedence of feeling over the volitional act—Polipathicism and apathicism—Erroneity of both the opposed theses—Historical and contingent meaning of these—The domination of the passions, and the will.
[IV] 229
VOLITIONAL HABITS AND INDIVIDUALITY
Passions and states of the soul—Passions understood as volitional habits—Importance and nature of these—Domination of the passions in so far as they are volitional habits—Difficulty and reality of dominating them—Volitional habits and individuality—Negations of individuality for uniformity and criticism of them—Temperament and character—Indifference of temperament—Discovery of one's own being—The idea of "vocation"—Misunderstanding of the right of individuality—Wicked individuality—False doctrines as to the connection between virtues and vices—The universal in the individual, and education.
[V] 246
DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS
Multiplicity and unity: development—Becoming as synthesis of being and not-being—Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the Spirit—Optimism and pessimism: critique—Dialectic optimism—Concept of cosmic progress—Objections and critique—Individuals and History—Fate, Fortune, and Providence—The infinity of progress and mystery—Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of history—Illegitimate transference of the concept of mystery from History to Philosophy.
[VI] 262
TWO EXPLANATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC
Relation between desires and actions; and two problems of Historic and Æsthetic—History and art—The concept of existentiality in history—Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and the existing, desires and the non-existent—History as distinction between actions and desires, and art as indistinction—Pure fancy and imagination—Art as lyrical or representation of feelings—Identity of ingenuous reality and feeling—Artists and the will—Actions and myths—Art as pure representation of becoming, and the artistic form of thought.
[VII] 273
HISTORICAL NOTES
I. The problem of freedom—II. The doctrine of evil—III. Will and freedom—Conscience and responsibility—IV. The concept of duty—Repentance and remorse—The doctrine of the passions—Virtues and vices—V. The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher—Romantic theories and most modern theories—VI. The concept of development and progress.
THIRD SECTION
UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL
Double result: precedence of the theoretical over the practical, and of the practical over the theoretical—Errors of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of the one or the other—Problem of the unity of this duality—Not a duality of opposites—Not a duality of finite and infinite—Perfect analogy of the two forms: theoretic and practical—Not a parallelism, but a circle—The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object—Critique of the theories as to the primacy of the theoretical or of the practical reason—New pragmatism: Life conditioning Philosophy—Deductive confirmation of the two forms, and deductive exclusion of the third (feeling).
SECOND PART
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS
FIRST SECTION
THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC
[I] 309
DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The utilitarian or economic form, and the moral or ethical form—Insufficiency of the descriptive and psychological distinction—Deduction and necessity of integrating it with induction—The two forms as a fact of consciousness—The economic form—The ethical form—Impossibility of eliminating them—Confirmations in fact.
[II] 323
CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM
Exclusion of materialistic and intellectualistic criticisms—The two possible negations—The thesis of utilitarianism against the existence of moral acts—Difficulty arising from the presence of these—Attempt to explain them as quantitative distinctions—Criticism of it—Attempt to explain them as facts, either extraneous to the practical or irrational, and stupid—Associationism and evolutionism. Critique—Desperate attempt: theological utilitarianism and mystery.
[III] 337
CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC FORM
The thesis of moral abstractionism against the concept of the useful—The useful as means, or as theoretic fact—Technical and hypothetical imperatives—Critique: the useful is a practical fact —The useful as the egoistic or the immoral—Critique: the useful is amoral—The useful as ethical minimum—Critique: the useful is premoral—Desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical conscience—Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.
[IV] 348
RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS
Economic and ethic as double degree of the practical—Errors arising from conceiving them as co-ordinated—Disinterested actions: critique—Vain polemic conducted with such Supposition against utilitarianism—Actions morally indifferent, obligatory, supererogatory, etc. Critique—Comparison with the relation between art and philosophy—Other erroneous conceptions of modes of action—Pleasure and economic activity, happiness and virtue—Pleasure and pain and feeling—Coincidence of duty with pleasure—Critique of rigorism or asceticism—Relation of happiness and virtue—Critique of the subordination of pleasure to morality—No empire of morality over the forms of the spirit—Non-existence of other practical forms; and impossibility of subdivision of the two established.
[V] 364
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY AND THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF ECONOMY
Problem of the relations between Philosophy and Science of economy —Unreality of the laws and concepts of economic Science—Economic Science founded on empirical concepts but not empirical or descriptive—Absoluteness of its laws—Their mathematical nature—Its principles and their character of arbitrary postulates and definitions—Its utility—Comparison of Economy with Mechanic, and reason for its exclusion from ethical, æsthetic, and logical facts—Errors of philosophism and historicism in Economy—The two degenerations: extreme abstractism and empiristical disaggregation—Glance at the history of the various directions of Economy—Meaning of the judgment of Hegel as to economic Science.
[VI] 382
CRITIQUE OF THE CONFUSIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY
Adoption of the economic method and formulæ on the part of Philosophy—Errors that derive from it—1st, Negation of philosophy for economy—2nd, Universal value attributed to empirical concepts. Example: free trade and protectionism—3rd, Transformation of the functions of calculation into reality—The pretended calculus of pleasures and pains; and doctrines of optimism and pessimism.
[VII] 391
HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness—II. Importance of Christianity for Ethic—The three tendencies that result from it: utilitarianism, rigorism, and psychologism—Hobbes, Spinoza—English Ethic—Idealistic Philosophy—III. E. Kant and his affirmation of the ethical principle—Contradictions of Kant as to the concept of the useful, of prudence, of happiness, etc.—Errors that derive from it in his Ethic—IV. Points for a Philosophy of Economy—The inferior appetitive faculty—Problem of politics and Machiavellism—Doctrine of the passions—Hegel and the concept of the useful—Fichte and the elaboration of the Kantian Ethic—V. The problem of the useful and of morality in the thinkers of the nineteenth century—Extrinsic union of Ethic and of economic Science, from antiquity to the nineteenth century—Philosophic questions arising from a more intimate contact between the two—VII. Theories of the hedonistic calculus: from Maupertuis to Hartmann.
SECOND SECTION
THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE
[I] 425
CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISTIC AND OF FORMALISTIC ETHIC
Various meanings of "formal" and "material"—The ethical principle as formal (universal) and not material (contingent)—Reduction of material Ethic to utilitarian Ethic—Expulsion of material principles—Benevolence, love, altruism, etc.; and critique of them—Social organism, State, interest of the species, etc. Critique of them—Material religious principles. Critique of them—"Formal" as statement of a merely logical demand—Critique of a formal Ethic with this meaning: tautologism—Tautological principles: ideal, chief good, duty, etc. Critique of them—Tautological significance of certain formulæ, material in appearance—Conversion of tautological Ethic into material and utilitarian Ethic—In what sense Ethic should be formal; and in what other sense material.
[II] 440
THE ETHICAL FORM AS ACTUALIZATION OF THE SPIRIT IN UNIVERSAL
Tautological Ethic, and its partial or discontinuous connection with Philosophy—Rejection of both these conceptions—The ethical form as volition of the universal—The universal as the Spirit (Reality, Liberty, etc.)—Moral actions as volitions of the Spirit—Critique of antimoralism—Confused tendency of tautological, material, religious formulæ in relation to the Ethic of the Spirit—The Ethic of the Spirit and religious Ethic.
[III] 452
HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Merit of the Kantian Ethic—The predecessors of Kant—Defect of that Ethic: agnosticism—Critique of Hegel and of others—Kant and the concept of freedom—Fichte and Hegel—Ethic in the nineteenth century.
THIRD PART
LAWS
[I] 465
LAWS AS PRODUCTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Definition of law—Philosophical and empirical concept of society—Laws as individual product: programmes of individual life—Exclusion of the character of constriction: critique of this concept—Identical characters of individual and social laws—Individual laws as the sole real in ultimate analysis—Critique of the division of laws into judicial and social, and into the sub-classes of these. Empiricity of every division of laws—Extension of the concept of laws.
[II] 481
THE CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS OF LAWS. CRITIQUE OF PERMISSIVE LAWS AND OF NATURAL LAW
The volitional character and the character of class—Distinction of laws from the so-called laws of nature—Implication of the second in the first—Distinction of laws from practical principles—Laws and single acts—Identity of imperative, prohibitive, and permissive laws—Permissive character of every law and impermissive character of every principle—Changeability of laws—Empirical considerations as to modes of change—Critique of the eternal Code or natural right—Natural right as the new right—Natural right as Philosophy of the practical—Critique of natural right—Theory of natural right persisting in judicial judgments and problems.
[III] 497
UNREALITY OF LAW AND REALITY OF EXECUTION. FUNCTION OF LAW IN THE PRACTICAL SPIRIT
Law as abstract and unreal volition—Ineffectually of laws and effectuality of practical principles—Exemplificatory explanation—Doctrines against the utility of laws—Their unmaintainability—Unmaintainability of confutations of them—Empirical meaning of these controversies—Necessity of laws—Laws as preparation for action—Analogy between practical and theoretical Spirit: practical laws and empirical concepts—The promotion of order in reality and in representation—Origin of the concept of plan or design.
[IV] 511
CONFUSION BETWEEN LAWS AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL LEGALISM AND OF JESUITIC MORALITY
Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism—Genesis of the concept of the practically licit and indifferent—Its consequence: the arbitrary—Ethical legalism as a simple special case of the practical—Critique of the practically indifferent—Contests of rigorists and of latitudinarians and their common error—Jesuitic morality as doctrine of fraud on moral law—Concept of legal fraud—Absurdity of fraud against oneself and against the moral conscience—Jesuitic morality not explainable by mere legalism—Jesuitic morality as alliance of legalism with theological utilitarianism—Distinction between Jesuitic practice and doctrine.
[V] 526
JUDICIAL ACTIVITY AS GENERICALLY PRACTICAL ACTIVITY (ECONOMIC)
Legislative activity as generically practical—Vanity of disputes as to the character of institutions, whether economic or ethical: punishment, marriage, State, etc.—Legislative activity as economic—Judicial activity: its economic character: its consequent identity with economic activity—Non-recognition of economic form, and meaning of the problem as to distinction between morality and rights—Theories of co-action and of exteriority, as distinctive characteristics: critique of them—Moralistic theories of rights: critique—Duality of positive and ideal rights, historical and natural rights, etc.; absurd attempts at unification and co-ordination—Value of all these attempts as confused glimpse of amoral character of rights—Confirmations of this character in ingenuous conscience—Comparison between rights and language. Grammar and codes—Logic and language; morality and rights—History of language as literary and artistic history—History of rights as political and social history.
[VI] 543
HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance for the history of the economic principle—Indistinction lasting till Tomasio—II. Tomasio and followers—Kant and Fichte—Hegel—Herbart and Schopenhauer—Rosmini and others—III. Stahl, Ahrens, Trendelenburg—Utilitarians—IV. Recent writers of treatises—Strident contradictions. Stammler—V. Value of law—In antiquity—Diderot—Romanticism—Jacobi—Hegel—Recent doctrines—VI. Natural rights and their dissolution—Historical school of rights—Comparison between rights and language—VII. Concept of law, and studies of comparative rights and of the general Doctrine of law—VIII. Legalism and moral casuistic—Probabilitism and Jesuitic morality—Critique of the concept of the licit—Fichte—Schleiermacher—Rosmini.
[CONCLUSION] 586
The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy—Correspondence between Logic and System—Dissatisfaction at the end of every system and its irrational motive—Rational motive: inexhaustibility of Life and of Philosophy.
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]
This translation of Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Practical (Economic and Ethic) is complete.
[FIRST PART]
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL
[FIRST SECTION]
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS
I
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT
Practical and theoretic life.
A glance at the life that surrounds us would seem more than sufficient to establish, without the necessity of special demonstration, the existence of a circle of practical activity side by side with the theoretical. We see in life men of thought and men of action, men of contemplation and of action, materially distinct, as it were, from one another: here, lofty brows and slow dreamy eyes; there, narrow brows, eyes vigilant and mobile; poets and philosophers on the one side; on the other, captains and soldiers of industry, commerce, politics, the army, and the church. Their work seems to differ as do the men. While we are intent upon some discovery just announced, in chemistry or in physic, or upon some philosophy that comes to shake old beliefs, upon a drama or a romance that revives an artist's dream, we are suddenly interrupted and our attention is called to spectacles of an altogether different nature, such as a war between two states, fought with cannon or with custom-house tariffs; or to a colossal strike, in which thousands upon thousands of workmen make the rest of society feel the power of their numbers and of their strength, and the importance of their work in the general total; or a potent organization which collects and binds together the forces of conservative resistance, employing interests and passions, hopes and fears, vices and virtues, as the painter his colours, or the poet his words, sometimes making like them a masterpiece, but of a practical nature. The man of action is from time to time assailed as it were with nausea at his orgies of volitional effort and eyes with envy the artist or the man of science in the same way as polite society used to look upon the monks who had known how to select the best and most tranquil lot in life. But as a general rule they do not go beyond this fleeting feeling, or if they do resolve to cease their business on the Ides, they return to it on the Kalends. But the contemplative man in his turn also sometimes experiences this same nausea and this same aspiration; he seems to himself to be idle where so many are working and bleeding, and he cries to the combatants: "Arms, give me arms,"[1] for he too would be a miner with the miners, would navigate with the navigators, be an emperor among the kings of coal. However, as a general rule, he does not make more out of this than a song or a book. Nobody, whatever his efforts, can issue from his own circle. It would seem that nature supplies men made precisely for the one or for the other form of activity, in the same way as she makes males and females for the preservation of the species.
Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions.
But this mode of existence with which the practical activity manifests itself in life, as though physically limited, has no certainty, when separated from the theoretical life, nor is it, as might be believed, a fact that imposes itself. Facts never impose themselves, save metaphorically: it is only our thought which imposes them upon itself, when it has criticized them and has recognized their reality. That existence and that distinction, which seem so obvious that one can touch them with one's hand, are at bottom nothing but the result of primary and superficial philosophic reflection, which posits as essentially distinct that which is so only at a first glance and in the mass. Indeed, if we continue to meditate with the same method and assumptions as in the first instance, we shall find that those very distinctions, which reflection had established, are by reflection annulled. It is not true that men are practical or theoretical.
The theoretical man is also practical; he lives, he wills, he acts like all the others. The so-called practical man is also theoretical; he contemplates, believes, thinks, reads, writes, loves music and the other arts. Those works that had been looked upon as inspired entirely by the practical spirit, when examined more closely, are found to be exceedingly complex and rich in theoretic elements—meditations, reasonings, historical research, ideal contemplations. Those works on the other hand that had been assumed to be manifestations of the purely artistic or philosophic spirit, are also products of the will, for without the will nothing can be done; the artist cannot prepare himself for his masterpiece for years and years, nor the thinker bring to completion his system. Was not the battle of Austerlitz also a work of thought and the Divine Comedy also a work of will? From such reflections as these, which might be easily multiplied, arises a mistrust, not only of the statement first made, but also of the inquiry that has been undertaken. It is as though one had filled a vessel with much difficulty and were then obliged to empty it anew with a like effort, to find oneself again facing the vessel, empty as before. Or one adheres to the conclusion that neither the theoretic nor the practical exists as distinct, but that they are one single fact, which is one or other of the two, or a third to be determined, manifesting itself concretely in infinite shades and gradations, which we arbitrarily attempt to reduce to one or more classes, separating and denominating them as distinct in a not less arbitrary manner.
Insufficiency of the psychological method in philosophy.
By describing this process of ordinary reflection, in relation to reality and by demonstrating its philosophic impotence, has at the same time been demonstrated the nature and the impotence of the psychological method, applied to philosophical problems. For psychological philosophy, though contained in ponderous treatises and in solemn academical lectures, does not really achieve more than ordinary reflection, or rather, is nothing but ordinary reflection. Having classified the images of the infinite manifestations of human activity, placing, for instance, will and action side, by side with thought and imagination, it looks upon this classification as reality. But classes are classes and not philosophical distinctions: whoever takes them too seriously, and understands them in this second sense, finds himself eventually obliged to admit that they possess no reality. Thereupon he declares with shouts and protestations the non-existence of the faculties of the soul, or rather their existence as a mere mental artifice, without relation to reality. He may do more than this and throw overboard the criterion or distinction itself, together with those false distinctions, proclaiming that all spiritual manifestations are reducible to a single element. This element turns out in the end to be precisely one of the rejected classes; hence the attempt to show that facts of volition are nothing but facts of representation, or that those of representation are nothing but facts of volition, or that both are nothing but facts of feeling, and so on.
Necessity of the philosophical method.
We must then remain perfectly indifferent to the affirmations or negations of this psychological philosophy. If it affirm the existence of the practical activity, we must not put faith in it until we have recognized its existence by the philosophical method, and equally so in case it should deny it. The philosophical method demands complete abstraction from empirical data and from their classes, and a withdrawal into the recesses of the consciousness, in order to fix upon it alone the eye of the mind. It has been affirmed that by this method the individual consciousness is made the type and measure of universal reality, and it has been suggested, with a view to obviate this restriction and danger, that we should extend observations, so as to include the soul of other individuals, of the present and of the past, of our own and of other civilizations, thus completing (in the accustomed phrase) the psychological with the historical and the ethnographical methods. But there is no need to fear, because the consciousness which is the object of the philosophical inquiry is not that of the individual as individual, but the universal consciousness, which is in every individual the basis of his individual consciousness and of that of other individuals. The philosopher who withdraws into himself is not seeking his own empirical self: Plato did not seek the son of Aristo and of Perictione, nor Baruch Spinoza the poor sickly Jew; they sought that Plato and that Spinoza, who are not Plato or Spinoza, but man, the spirit, universal being. The remedy proposed will therefore seem not only useless, but actually harmful; for in an inquiry whose very object is to surpass the empirical itself, is offered the aid of a multiplicity of selves, thus increasing the tumult and the confusion, where there should be peace and silence; offering, in exchange for the universal that was sought, something worse than the individual, namely, the general, which is an arbitrary complex of mutilated individualities.
Constatation and deduction.
It may seem, however, that the result of such an inquiry as to the form and the universality of consciousness would merely possess the value of a statement of fact, not different from any other statement, as when we say, for instance, that the weather is rainy, or that Tizio has married. If these two last facts be indubitable, because well observed, in like manner indubitable, because likewise well observed, will be an affirmation concerning the universal consciousness. And since both affirmations are true, there is certainly no difference between them, or between truth and truth, considered as such. But since single and contingent facts, like the two adduced in the example, are single and contingent, precisely because they have not their own reason in themselves, and because the universal is the universal, precisely because it is a sufficient reason to itself, it clearly results that we cannot assume that truth has been definitely established from the universal standpoint of consciousness, save when the reason for this also has been seen, that is to say until that aspect has been simply enunciated and asserted, as in the case of a single fact. To affirm the existence of the practical form of activity, side by side with the theoretical, means to deduce the one from the other, and both from the unity of the spirit and of the real. We do not intend to withdraw ourselves from this duty and exigency; and if we limit ourselves here at the beginning to the assertion of its existence and to the demonstration that the arguments brought against it are unfounded, we do so for didascalic reasons, certain that in due course we shall be able to free this assertion from what it may contain of provisional, that is to say, from the character itself of assertion.
Theories which deny the practical form of the spirit.
The doctrines which deny the practical form of the spirit are and cannot but be of two fundamental kinds, according to the double possibility offered by the proposition itself which they propose to refute. The first doctrine affirms that the practical form is not spiritual activity, the second that although it be spiritual activity, yet it is not in any way distinguishable from the already recognized theoretic form of the spirit. The second, so to speak, denies to it specific, the first generic character.
The practical as a fact of unconsciousness.
Those who maintain the first of these theses say:—We are unconscious of the will at the moment of willing and during its real development. This consciousness is only attained after one has willed, that is to say, after the volitional act has been developed. Even then, we are not conscious of the will itself, but of our representation of the will. Therefore the will, that is to say the practical activity, is not an activity of the spirit. Since it is unconscious, it is nature and not spirit. The theoretic activity which follows it is alone spiritual.
Critique.
Were we, however, to allow this argument to pass, the result would be that none of the activities of the spirit would belong to the spirit, that they would all be unconscious and all, therefore, nature. Indeed, the activity of the artist, at the moment when he is really so, that is to say in what is called the moment of artistic creation, is not conscious of itself: it becomes conscious only afterwards, either in the mind of the critic or of the artist who becomes critic of himself. And it has also often been said of the activity of the artist, that it is unconscious; that it is a natural force, or madness, fury, divine inspiration. Est Deus in nobis; and we only become conscious of the divinity that burns and agitates us when the agitation is ceasing and cooling begun. But what of the activity of the philosopher? It may seem strange, but it is precisely the same with the philosopher. At the moment in which he is philosophizing, he is unconscious of his work; in him is God, or nature; he does not reflect upon his thought, but thinks; or rather the thing thinks itself in him, as a microbe living in us nourishes itself, reproduces itself and dies: so that sometimes the philosopher has also seemed to be seized with madness. The consciousness of his philosophy is not in him at that moment; but it is in the critic and in the historian, or indeed in himself a moment after, in so far as he is critic and historian of himself. And will the critic or the historian at least be conscious? No, he will not be so either, because he who will afterwards criticize the historico-critical work is conscious of it, or he himself, in so far as he criticizes himself, and by objectifying himself occupies a place in the history of criticism and of historiography. In short, we should never be conscious in any form of the spiritual activity.
But this negation is founded on a false idea of consciousness: spontaneous is confused with reflex consciousness, or that which is intrinsic to one activity with that which is intrinsic to another, which surpasses the first and makes of it its object. In such a sense we can certainly not be conscious of the will, save in the representation which follows it, as we are not conscious of a poem, save at the moment of criticizing it. But there is also consciousness in the act itself of him who reads or composes a poem, and he "is conscious" (there is no other expression) of its beauty and of its ugliness, of how the poem should and of how it should not be. This consciousness is not critical, but is not therefore less real and efficacious, and without it internal control would be wanting to the formative act of the poet. Thus also there is consciousness in the volitional and practical act as such: we are not aware of this act in a reflex manner, but we feel, or, if you will, we possess it. Without it there would be no result. It is therefore developed in moments or alternatives of happiness and of unhappiness, of well-being and of malaise, of satisfaction and of remorse, of pleasure and of pain. If this be unconsciousness, we must say that unconsciousness is consciousness itself.
Nature and practical activity.
The practical activity may appear to be nature in respect of the theoretical, but not as something without the spirit and opposed to it, but as a form of the spirit opposed to another form, esthetic contemplation has in like manner, as has already been mentioned, appeared to be a natural force creating the world of intuition, which the philosophical activity of man afterwards understands and recreates logically. Hence art can be called nature (and has indeed been so called), and conversely philosophy has been called spirituality. This gives rise to the further problem: whether it be correct to consider nature (it is convenient so to call it) that which has afterwards been recognized in substance as spiritual activity; or whether the concept and the name of spirit should not be reserved for that which is truly altogether outside the spirit, and whether this something placed altogether outside the spirit truly exists. This point does not concern us here, although we are much disposed to admit that one of the mainstays of that absurd conception of nature as of the extra-spiritual is precisely the practical or volitional form of the spirit, so conspicuously different from the theoretical form and from the sub-forms of the same. We do not therefore hold those philosophers to have been so completely in the wrong, who have identified nature and will, for they have thus at any rate discovered one aspect of the truth.
Reduction of the practical form to the theoretical.
Passing to the second thesis, which does not place the will outside the spirit, but denies to it the distinction between practical and the theoretical forms and affirms that the will is thought, there is nothing to be objected to it, provided that, as is often the case, "thought" be taken as synonymous with "spirit." In this case, as in that where it is affirmed that art is thought, we need only inquire, what form of thought is the will, as in the other what form of thought is art. It is not, for instance, logical or historical thought, and the will is neither imaginative, logical nor historical thought: if anything, it must be volitional thought.
But we have the genuine form of this thesis in the affirmation that the will is the intelligence itself, that to will is to know, and that action practically well conducted is truth. This thesis would not have arisen, had it not found support in the real situation of things (and what this support is will be seen when studying the relation of the practical with the theoretic activity, and the complicated process of deliberation). But, when tested here independently, it proves to be unsustainable.
Critique.
We must not oppose to it the usual observations as to the lack of connection between great intellectual and great volitional development, or the cases of those theoreticians who are practically quite ineffectual, of philosophers who are bad governors of States, of the "very learned" who are not "men" and the like; for the reason already given, that an observation is not a philosophical argument, but a fact which itself has need of an explanation, and when this has been done, it may serve as proof of the philosophical theory, but can never be substituted for it. But it is well to recall to memory the quite peculiar character of the will and the practical activity in respect of knowledge, intellectual light is cold, the will is hot. When we pass from theoretic contemplation to action and to the practical, we have almost the feeling of generating, and sons are not made with thoughts and words. With the greatest intellectual clearness, we yet remain inert, if something does not intervene that rouses to action, something analogous to the inspiration that makes run a shiver of joy and of voluptuousness through the veins of the artist. If the will be not engaged, every argument, however plausible it may seem, every situation, however clear, remains mere theory.
The education of the will is not effected with theories or definitions, æsthetic or historical culture, but with the exercise of the will itself. We teach how to will as we teach how to think, by fortifying and intensifying natural dispositions, by example, which suggests imitation, by difficulties to be solved (practical problems), by rousing energetic initiative and by disciplining it to persist. When an act of will has taken place, no argument will extinguish it. As an illness is not to be cured with reasons, so an affective and volitional state cannot be altered by these means. Reasoning and knowledge may and certainly do assist, but they do not constitute the ultimate and determining moment. The will alone acts upon the will, not in the sense that the will of one individual can act upon that of another (which is merely a fact among the facts perceived by him), but in the sense that the will of the individual himself, causing the previous volition to enter upon a crisis, dissolves it and substitutes for it a new practical synthesis, with a new volition.
The practical as thought which realizes itself. Recognition of its autonomy.
The evident paradox of the thesis which identifies without any distinction thought and will, theory and practice, has caused it to be modified and to be produced in another form, expressed in the definition; that the will is thought in so far as it is translated into act, thought in so far as it is imprinted upon nature, thought when held so firmly before the mind as to become action, and so on. Now it remains to determine what may be the relation between thought and will, and when this has been done, we shall see what is exact and what inexact in the above formulæ, of translating, imprinting, and holding fast. These formulæ are all logically vague, however imaginative they may be. But what is important to note here is that with the new turn given to the thesis that denies the peculiarity of the practical activity, this same peculiarity is unconsciously affirmed, because that transforming, that imprinting, that holding fast, which did not exist in the simple theory, conceal precisely the will. Thus the ultimate form of the negation comes to join hands with that of the affirmation, and we can consider undisputed the existence of a particular form of the spirit, which is the practical activity. We must now examine the relation of this form with the other from which it has been distinguished.
[1] Allusion to a verse of Leopardi in Canzone all' Italia.
[II]
NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING
The practical activity and the so-called third spiritual form: feeling.]
In affirming the existence of the practical form of activity, we have had in view only the theoretical form and have demonstrated that the one cannot be absorbed and confused in the other, and we have referred only to the theoretic form, when announcing our intention of determining the relations of the practical with the other forms of the spirit. This seems but little correct, and in any case not exhaustive, because there are or may be other non-theoretical forms of the spirit, into which the practical form could be resolved. Of these it would be necessary to take account. And not to beat too long about the bush, that of which in this case it is question, is the form of feeling, the last or intermediary of the three forms into which it is customary to divide the spiritual activity: representation, feeling, tendency; thought, feeling, will. Attempts have not been wanting to reduce tendency or will to feeling, or, as is said, to a sentimental reaction from perceptions and thoughts. In fact there is hardly a treatise of philosophy of the practical without a preliminary study of the relations between the will and feeling. We cannot, then, escape from the dilemma; either we must recognize the omission into which we have fallen and hasten to correct it, or else make explicit the supposition that may be contained in that omission (which would thus be intentional and conscious), that a third general form of the spirit, or a form of feeling, does not exist. We have adopted precisely this last position, and it therefore becomes incumbent upon us briefly to expose the reasons for which we hold that the concept of feeling must disappear from the system of the spiritual forms or activities.
Various meanings of the word feeling, as a psychological class.
Feeling may and has been understood in various ways, some of which do not at all concern our thesis. In the first place, the word "feeling" has been used to designate a class of psychical facts constructed according to the psychological and naturalistic method. Thus it has happened that, with various times and authors, all the most rudimentary, tenuous, and evanescent manifestations of the spirit have been called "feelings," slight intuitions (or sensations as they are called), not yet transformed into perceptions, slight perceptions, slight tendencies and appetites, in fact all that forms, as it were, the base of the life of the spirit. The name has thus, on the other hand, also been given to psychical processes and conditions, in which various forms follow one another or alternate in relation to a material empirically limited. Such are what are called feelings of "fatherland," "love," "nature," "the divine." Nothing forbids the formation of such classes and the use of that denomination, but as has already been declared in relation to the psychological method, they are of no use to philosophy, which not only does not receive them within its limits, but does not occupy itself with them at all, save to reject them when they present themselves, as philosophical psychology or psychological philosophy. To classify is not to think philosophically, and philosophy on the one hand does not recognize criteria of small and great, of weak and strong, of more and of less, and a small or smallest thought, a small or smallest tendency, is for it thought and tendency and not feeling at all; on the other, it does not admit complicated processes without resolving these into their simple components. Thus the feeling of love or of patriotism, and the others made use of in the example, are revealed to philosophy as series of acts of thought and of will, variously interlaced. Let the psychologists, then, keep their classes and sub-classes of feeling. We, for our part, not only do not dream of di-possessing them of such a treasure, but shall continue to draw from it, when necessary, the small change of ordinary conversation.
Feeling as a state of the spirit.
There also exists another meaning of the word "feeling," of which, at present at any rate, we do not take account. This appears when the word is used to designate the state of the spirit or of one of the special forms of the spirit; we should indeed term these more correctly the states, since the spirit in this case, as is known, is polarized in two opposite terms, usually denominated pleasure and pain. Indubitably these two terms can also be taken as psychological (and are thus included in the preceding case). Hence it results that pleasure and pain are represented by psychologists as the two extremes of a continuous series, in which there is a passage from the one to the other term by insensible increases and gradations. But we must also recognize that this psychological representation is not the only one possible, and indeed is not truly the real one, and that the two terms have their place and their proper meaning in the philosophy of the spirit. They are, as has been said, opposites; and are differentiated, not only by a more and a less, by a greatest and a least, but also by the special character of distinction that opposites possess. The doctrine of opposites and of opposites in the practical activity of the spirit does not, however, appertain to this part of our exposition. In denying feeling, we do not here deny the doctrine of opposites, and that psychology of the states of the spirit which is founded upon it, but the doctrine of feeling considered as a particular form of activity.
Function of the concept of feeling in the History of philosophy; the indeterminate.
The conception of feeling as a spiritual activity has answered to a want of research, which may be described as provisional excogitation. Whenever thought has found itself face to face with a form or subform of spiritual activity, which it was not possible either to eliminate or to absorb in forms already recognized, the problem to be solved has been endorsed with that word "feeling." With many this has passed for a solution. Feeling, in fact, has been the indeterminate in the history of philosophy, or rather the not yet fully determined, the half-determined.
Hence its great importance as an expedient for the indication of new territories to conquer, and as a stimulus against remaining obstinately shut up in old and insufficient formulæ. But hence also its fate: the problem must not be exchanged for its solution, the indeterminate or semi-determinate must be determined. Whenever the determination of the forms and sub-forms of the spirit has not been given in a complete manner, the category of feeling will reappear (and it will be beneficial); but at the same time will reappear the duty of exploring it and of understanding what is concealed beneath it, or at least what unsolved difficulty has caused it to reappear afresh.
Now we have already met with the concept of feeling on more than one occasion, when investigating the philosophy of the theoretic spirit, as something supplying a theoretical need outside the theoretic forms generally admitted, or as a special form of theoretic activity. Every time that we have done this, an attentive examination has caused it to disappear before our eyes, and has generally helped us, either to discover something previously unknown, or to confirm the necessity of contested categories.
Feeling as herald of the æsthetic form;
Thus it happened that when a special æsthetic function was not recognized and it was attempted to explain it, either intellectualistically, as nothing but an inferior form of philosophy, or historically, as a reproduction of the historical and natural datum, or almost as the satisfaction of certain volitional wants (hedonistic theory), the view of art as neither a form of the intellect nor of perception nor of will, but of feeling, was an advance, as also was the appeal to men of feeling to recognize and to judge it. As a result of this insistence, it was eventually discovered that art possessed an absolutely simple and ingenuous theoretic form, without either intellectual or historical contents, the form of the pure intuition which is that of the æsthetic and artistic activity. Whoever returns to treat of art as a product of feeling, after this discovery of the pure intuition, falls back from the determinate to the semi-determinate, and is at the mercy of all the dangers which arise from it.
As herald of the intuitive element in Historiography.
The theory of historiography owes its progress in like manner to the demonstration that it is impossible to deduce the historical statement from concepts, but that we must deduce it in final analysis from an immediate feeling of the real, that is to say, from the intuitive element, which inevitably exists in every historical reconstruction, as in every perception. On the other hand, and in altogether another sense, reacting against the false idea of an extra—subjective historical objectivity, to be found in the mere reproduction of the datum, it was made evident that no historical narration is possible without the reaction of feeling in respect to the datum. Thus was discovered the indispensability of the intellective element in the historical affirmation. Whoever has recourse to feeling as a factor in historiography, after this complete constitution of the historical judgment, returns from the clear to the confused, from light, if not to darkness, then to twilight.
Feeling as herald of the pure concept in philosophical Logic.
The concept of feeling has also been of capital importance in the progress of the Logic of philosophy. For how could we begin to explain that philosophy is constructed with a method altogether different from that of the exact disciplines (natural sciences and mathematics), without denying to those sciences the capacity of conquering the supreme truth, the true truth, full reality, and recognizing such capacity on the other hand to a special function called feeling or immediate knowledge? That function was void, that is to say, undetermined, because defined in a negative and not in a positive manner: feeling was something different from the abstract and arbitrary procedure of the exact sciences, from the abstract intellect, but its true nature was unknown. When this was at last known it was discovered that it was not a question of "feeling" or of "immediate knowledge," but of the intellect itself, in its genuine and uncontaminated nature, its pure and free activity, of intellect as reason, of thought as speculative thought, of that "immediate knowledge," which is true, intrinsic, perpetual mediation. Whoever henceforth returns to feeling, after the discovery of the pure or speculative concept, and believes it to be the creator of philosophy and of religion, fighting with it against the natural and mathematical sciences, behaves as he who should wish to return to-day to the flint-lock, for the excellent reason that it was an advance upon the bow and the catapult. Thus those who invoke feeling in philosophy are henceforth a little ridiculous. This does not imply that they were not at one time to be taken seriously, for this concept has been of great provisional assistance and has been as it were the compass of the new idea of philosophy.
Analogous function in the Philosophy of the practical.
The same will be the case in the investigation that we have begun of the practical form of the spirit and of the problems to which it gives rise. This concept of feeling has been mingled with them all, and propositions have been formed, of which we shall indicate the true significance in the proper places. Beginning at once and limiting ourselves solely to the question of the existence of a peculiar practical form, it is easy to understand why it has so often been maintained against the intellectual and theoretical exclusivists, that the will consists, not of knowledge, but of feeling; that the principle of action, far from being an intellectual principle, is sentimental emotion; that in order to produce a volition, reason, ideas, and facts perceived do not suffice, but that it is necessary that all these things be transformed into feelings, which must take possession of the soul; that the base of life lived, that is, of practical life, is not thought, but feeling, and so on. With these formulæ was recognized the peculiarity of the practical activity. The theory of feeling in respect of the practical represents progress as compared with the intellectualistic theory, because the appearance of indeterminateness is progress as compared with bad determinateness, and contains in itself the new and more complete determinateness.
Negation of feeling.
But in this very way of ours of understanding the value of these formulæ, is implied their resolute negation, when they tend to persist, after having accomplished their function, and to maintain side by side with the theory of the practical a third general form of the spirit, namely feeling. No spiritual fact or manifestation of activity can be adduced, which, examined without superficiality, is not reducible to an act of fancy, intellect and perception, that is, of theory (when it is not at once revealed as an abstraction or as a merely psychological class of these acts); or to an act of utilitarian or ethical volition (when it is not here too a psychological class, variously designated as aspirations, passions, affections, and the like). Let him who will search his spirit and attempt to indicate one single act, differing from the above, as something new and original and deserving of the special denomination of feeling.
Its deductive exclusion.
This constatation of fact (we repeat the warning) is but the first step in the complete philosophical demonstration, which demands that we show not only that a third form does not exist, but that it cannot exist. This demonstration will be given further on, and will coincide with that of the demonstration of the necessity of the two forms, theoretical and practical; a duality that is unity and a unity that is duality. Recognizing the legitimacy of the demand for a philosophical deduction of the forms of the spirit, and therefore of a deductive exclusion of those that are spurious and wrongly adopted, it seems that if it be somewhat delayed, such a mode of exclusion will also yield clearer results.
III
RELATION OF THE PRACTICAL TO THE THEORETIC ACTIVITY
Precedence of the theoretical activity.
Freed from the equivocal third term, which is feeling, and now passing to the problem of the relation between the theoretical and the practical activity enunciated, we must in the first place declare the thesis that the practical activity presupposes the theoretical. Will is impossible without knowledge; as is knowledge, so is will.
The unity of the spirit and the co-presence of the practical.
In recognizing this precedence of knowledge to will, we do not wish to posit as thinkable a theoretical man or a theoretical moment altogether deprived of will. This would be an unreal abstraction, inadmissible in philosophy, which operates solely with real abstractions, that is, with universal concretes. The forms of the spirit are distinct and not separate, rand when the spirit is found in one of its forms, or is explicit in it, the other forms are also in it, but implicit, or, as is also said, concomitant. If theoretical and cognoscitive man were not at the same time volitional, he would not even be able to stand on his feet and look at the sky, and, literally speaking, if he were not alive, he would not be able to think (and thinking is both an act of life and an act of will, which is called attention). Were he not to will, he would be unable to pass from waking to sleep and from sleep to waking. Thus in order to be purely theoretical, it is necessary to be at the same time in some degree practical; the energy of pure fancy and of pure thought springs from the trunk of volition. Hence the importance of the will for the æsthetic and intellectual life; the will is not theory, nor is it the force that makes grain to grow or guides the course of rivers, but as it assists the culture of grain or restrains the destructive impetus of rivers, so it assists and restrains the force of fancy and of thought, causing them to act in the best way, that is, to be as they really ought to be, namely, fancy and thought in their purest manifestation. The practical activity, therefore, acts in this way, and as it drags the man of science from his study and the artist from his studio, if it be necessary to defend his country or to watch at the bedside of his sick father, so it commands the artist and the man of science to fulfil their special mission and to be themselves in an eminent degree.
Critique of pragmatism.
All the arguments that have been used in the past and that are used in the present, to maintain the dependence of the theoretical upon the practical activity, are of value for what of truth they contain, that is, only to demonstrate this unity of the spiritual functions that we have recognized, and the indispensability of the volitional force for the health of the cognoscitive spirit. But the passage from this thesis to the other, that the true is the production of the will, is nothing but a sophism, founded on the double signification of the word "production." It should be clear that to assist the work of thought with the will is one thing and that to substitute the will for the work of thought is another. To claim to substitute the will for the work of thought, is equivalent to the negation of that force that should be assisted; it is the most open proclamation of scepticism, the most complete distrust of the true and of the possibility of attaining to it. This attempt is now called pragmatism, or is at any rate one of the meanings of the word, with which the school of the greatest confusion that has ever appeared in philosophy adorns itself in our day. This school mixes together the most divergent theses—that of the stimulating effect that the will has upon thought, that other of the volitional or arbitrary moment, by means of which perceptions and historical data are reduced to abstract types in the natural disciplines, or postulates laid down for the construction of mathematical classes. The third form, which might be called the Baconian prejudice, maintains the exclusive utility of the natural sciences and mathematics for the well-being of life. The fourth thesis is positivistic: here it is maintained that we cannot know anything save what we ourselves arbitrarily compress into the formula and classes of mathematics and of naturalism. The fifth thesis is a romantic exaggeration of the principle of creative power in man, substituting the caprice of the individual for the universal spirit. The sixth, something between silliness and Jesuistry, recommends the utility of making one's illusions and believing them to be true. The seventh is superstitious, occultist and spiritistic—and there are others that we omit. If pragmatism has had and preserves any attraction, it owes this to the truth of its first and second theses and to the half truth of the fifth. All the three are however heterogeneous in themselves and unreconcilable with the others, which are most fallacious. But we repeat with the old philosophers that whoever in thinking says, "Thus I will it," is lost for truth.
Critique of psychological objections.
Certain reservations that are made to the above truth from the point of view of that philosophy, which we have called psychological, are scarcely deserving of brief mention. We find in treatises of Psychology that knowledge does precede the practical act, but only in the higher forms of volition, whereas in its lower forms are found only impulses, tendencies, appetites, altogether blind of any knowledge. Thus they are able to talk of involuntary forms of the practical activity, of a will that is not a will, when once the true will has been defined, as precisely appetition illumined by previous knowledge. The blind will of certain metaphysicians is derived from such excogitations of psychologists, who make of it a practical act without intelligence. They have here attributed the value of reality to a crude concept of class, a thing that happens not infrequently. A blind will is however unthinkable. Every form of the practical activity, be it as poor and rudimentary as you like (and let as many classes and gradations as you will be formed), presupposes knowledge of some sort. In animals too? will be asked. In animals too, provided they be, and in so far as they are centres of life, and so of perceptions and of will. This is also true of vegetables and of minerals, always with the above hypothesis. We must banish every form of aristocracy from the Philosophy of the practical, as we have banished it from Æsthetic, from Logic, from Historic, esteeming it most harmful to the proper understanding of those activities. The aristocratic illusion is closely allied to that one which makes us believe that we, shut up in the egotism of our empirical individuality, are alone aware of the truth, that we alone feel the beautiful, that we alone know how to love, and so on. But reality is democratic.
From the psychological point of view yet another objection has been raised. Knowledge (it is affirmed) cannot be the indispensable base of the will, if, as is the case, the ignorant are often far more effective than many learned men and philosophers. These latter, they say, although possessing very great knowledge, and no less a stock of good intentions, yet do not know how to direct their lives successfully. But it is evident that in these cases the so-called ignorant possess just that knowledge which is necessary for the purpose and is lacking to the learned and to the philosopher, who would themselves be the ignorant in such a case. Nicholas Macchiavelli was ignorant as compared with Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, when he kept the spectators waiting two hours in the sun, while he was attempting to dispose three thousand infantry according to the directions that he had written. This he would never have succeeded in doing, had not Signor Giovanni, with the help of drummers and in the twinkling of an eye caused them to execute the various manœuvres and afterwards carried Master Nicholas to dine, who, save for him, would not have dined at all that day.[1]
Nature of the theoretical precedence of the practical: historical knowledge.
The knowledge required for the practical act is not that of the artist, nor of the philosopher, or rather, it is these two also, but only in so far as both are to be found as elements co-operating in that ultimate and complete knowledge which is historical. If the first be called intuition, the second concept, and the third perception, and the third be looked upon as the result of the two preceding, it will be said that the knowledge required for the practical act is perceptive. Hence the common saying that praises the sure eye of the practical man; hence, too, the close bond between historical sense and practical and political sense; hence, too, the justifiable diffidence of those who, unable to grasp effectual reality, hope to attain to it by force of mere syllogisms and abstractions, or believe that they have attained to it, when they have erected an imaginary edifice. They prove by so doing that they can never be practical men, at least in the sphere of action at which they are then aiming.
Such knowledge is not of itself the practical act. The historian as such is a contemplative, not a practical man or politician. If that spark which is volition, do not spring forth, the material of knowledge does not catch fire and is not transformed into the material of the practical. But that knowledge is the condition, and if the condition be not the conditioned, yet one cannot have the conditioned without the condition. In this last signification, it is true that action is knowledge, will, and wisdom, that is to say, in the sense that willing and acting presuppose knowledge and wisdom. In this sense, and considered solely in the stage of the cognoscitive investigation which will form the base of action, the deliberation is a theoretical fact. The customary expressions of logical, rational, judicious actions, are metaphors, because action may be weak or energetic, coherent or incoherent; but it will not have those predicates which are proper to theoretical acts that precede actions, on which the metaphors aforesaid are founded. As are these acts, so originate the practical act, will, and action. We can act in so far as we have knowledge. Volition is not the surrounding world which the spirit perceives; it is a beginning, a new fact. But this fact has its roots in the surrounding world, this beginning is irradiated with the colours of things that man has perceived as a theoretical spirit, before he took action as a practical spirit.
Its continual changeability.
It is important to observe, as much to prevent an equivoke into which many fall, as because of the consequences that will follow from holding it, that we must not look upon the perceptive knowledge of reality that surrounds us as a firm basis, upon which we act, by translating the formed volition into act. For were this so, we should have to assume that the surrounding world, perceived by the spirit, stops after the perceptive act, which is not the case. That world changes every second, the perceptive act perceives the new and the different, and the volitional act changes according to that real and perceived change. Perception and volition alternate every instant; in order to will, we must touch the earth at every instant, in order to resume force and direction.
No other theoretic precedent.
Continuous perception and continuous change, that is the necessary theoretic condition of volition. It is necessary and unique. No other theoretical element is needed, because every other is contained in it, and beyond it no other is thinkable.
Critique of concepts and practical judgments.
But if this be true and no other theoretic element save that precede the volition, then we find in the aforesaid theory the criticism of a series of other theories, generally admitted in the Philosophy of the practical, not less than in ordinary thought, none of which can be retained without alterations and corrections.
Or better, there are not so many various theories to criticize; there is rather one theory, which presents itself under different aspects and assumes various names. This theory consists substantially in affirming that with the complex of cognitions, of which we have hitherto treated (all of which are summed up in the historical judgment), we do not yet possess that one which is necessary, before we can proceed to volition and action. A special form of concepts and judgments which can be called practical, must, it is said, appear; these render the will possible, by interposing themselves between the previous merely historical judgment and the will. Is it not indubitable that we possess practical concepts, that is, concepts of classes of action or of supreme guides to action, concepts of things good, of ideals, of ends, and that we effect judgments of value by the application of those concepts to the image of given actions? Is it not indubitable that those judgments and those concepts refer, not to the simple present fact, but to the future? How could we will, if we did not know what is good to will, and that a given possible action corresponds to that concept of good?
Posteriority of judgments to the practical act.
Now it is undeniable that we in fact possess the above-mentioned concepts and judgments. But what we must absolutely deny is that they differ in any respect from other concepts and theoretical judgments, and that they deserve to be distinguished from these as practical and that they have the future for their object. The future, that which is not, is not an object of knowledge; the material of the judgment, whether it concern actions or thoughts, does not alter its logical and theoretical character; the concepts of modes of action are concepts neither more nor less than those of modes of thought. With this negation we at the same time deny the possibility of their interposing themselves between knowledge and will. Those judgments, far from being anterior to the will, are posterior to it.
Let us state a simple case and observe the course of analysis on the lines of the theory here criticized. It is winter-time; I am cold; there is a wood close by, and I know that by cutting wood one can light a fire and that fire gives heat: I therefore resolve to cut wood. According to that theory, the spiritual process would be expressed in the following chain of propositions: I know the actual situation, that is to say, that I am cold, that wood gives fire and fire heat, and that there exists wood that can be cut; I possess the concept that it is a good thing to provide for the health of the body; I judge that with heat I shall procure health during the winter, and that in consequence heat is a good thing and the cutting of wood, without which I cannot procure heat, is also good. Having made all these constatations, I set in motion the spring of my will, and I will to cut the wood.—The process as above described seems real and controllable by every one; but it is, on the contrary, illusory. The practical judgment: "I shall act well in cutting the wood" really means, "I will to cut the wood;" "this is a good thing" really means, "I will this." I may change my will a moment after, substituting for this volition one that is different or contrary, that does not matter. At the moment that I formed that judgment, I must have seen myself in the volitional attitude of a man cutting wood; the will must have come first. Otherwise the judgment would never have existed. Given the first actual situation and its complete expression in the judgment, no other judgment can arise, if the actual situation do not change and nothing new supervene. This new thing is always my will, which, when the situation changes (as in the example, if I walk from the house to the tree, or if I simply move my body in an imperceptible, manner in the direction of the action willed), by adding to the actual reality something that was not there before, provides material for a new judgment. This judgment is called practical, but it is theoretical, like the others that precede it; a judgment believed to precede the volition, whereas in reality it follows it; a judgment believed to condition a future act of will, whereas it is in reality the past act of will looking at itself in the glass; a judgment that is not really practical but historical.
The illusion that things happen differently is caused by the fact that we possess judgments concerning our past volitions, which are afterwards collected into abstract formulæ, such as that "it is well to cut wood." But, on the one hand, those formulæ and judgments are in their turn formed from previous volitions, and on the other, those formulæ do not possess any absolute value in the single and concrete situation, so that they can be modified and substituted for others that affirm the opposite. The question is not whether cutting wood has been as a rule a good thing for me in the past, nor whether I have generally willed it in the past: the question is to will it at this moment, that is, to posit the cutting of wood at this moment as a good thing.
Posteriority of the practical concepts.
As is the case with the pretended practical judgments and concepts of classes formed upon them, so the concepts that they imply, of things good, of ideals, of ends, of actions worthy of being willed, and so on, do not precede, but follow the volition that has taken place. These concepts are the incipient reflection, scientific and philosophical, upon the spontaneous acts of the will, and we cannot practise science nor philosophize save about facts that have already taken place: if the fact do not precede, there can be no theory. Certainly theory does not do other than seek out the already created and give the real principles of actions in the form of thought principles, in the same manner as Logic discovers those principles that live and operate in logical thought. But since the formula of the principle of contradiction is not necessary for thinking without contradiction, but presupposes it, so the concepts of ends, of things good, and of ideals are not necessary for volitions, but presuppose them.
Origin of intellectualist and sentimentalist doctrines.
The thesis of the will as knowledge draws support from the mistaken belief in the practical principles and judgments that precede volition, as also does the proposition that he who knows what is good for him also wishes it, and that he who does not wish it does not know it. This thesis is to be inverted, because to know what is good for one means that one has willed it. From the opposite point of view, the other thesis, of the impossibility of volition unless feeling be interposed between what is known and the will, is to be attributed to a like mistaken belief. Feeling is held to give, as it were, a particular value to facts, and to cause them to be felt as they should be felt, or to be changed. The customary merit possessed by theories of feeling is to be recognized in this thesis: that is to say, it has awakened or reawakened consciousness of the peculiarity of the practical act in respect to intellectualistic reductions and identifications. This merit is not altogether lacking to the general theory of practical judgments itself. These, although called judgments, were classified differently to all the others, precisely because they were practical.
The concepts of end and means.
Having thus shown that it is not true that man first knows the end and then wills it, it is possible to establish with greater precision what is to be understood by end. The end, then, in universal, is the concept itself of will. Considered in the single act, as this or that end, it is nothing but this or that determinate volition. Hence is also to be derived a better definition of its relation to the means, which it is usual to conceive empirically and erroneously as a part of volition and action at the service of another part. An act of will is an infrangible unity and can be taken as divided only for practical convenience. In the volitional act, all is volition; nothing is means, and all is end. The means is nothing but the actual situation, from which the volitional act takes its start, and is in that way really distinguished from the end. Distinction and unification take place together, because, as has been remarked, the volition is not the situation, yet, on the other hand, as the volition, so the situation: the one varies as a function of the other. Hence the absurdity of the maxim, that the end justifies the means. This maxim is of an empirical character and has sometimes been employed to justify actions erroneously held to be unjustifiable, and more often to make pass as just actions that were unjustifiable. As the end, so the means, but the means is what is given and has no need of justification. The end is what has been willed and must be justified in itself.
Critique of the end as flan or as fixed design.
The idea that we generally have of finality is to be eliminated, owing to the continual changeability of the means, that is, of the actual situation, which would posit the end as something fixed, as a plan to be carried out. The difference between the finality of man and that of nature has recently been made to reside in nature: which has seemed to act upon a plan which she changes, remakes, and accommodates at every moment, according to contingencies, so that the point of arrival is not for her predetermined or predeterminable. But the same can be said of the human will and of its finality. The will too changes at every moment, as the movement of a swimmer or of an athlete changes at every moment, according to the motion of the sea or of the rival athlete, and according to the varying measure or quality of his own strength in the course of the volitional process. Man acts, case for case and from instant to instant, realizing his will of every instant, not that abstract conception which is called a plan. Hence also arises the confirmation of the belief that there do not exist fixed types and models of actions. He who seeks and awaits such models and types does not know how to will. He is without that initiative, that creativeness, that genius, which is not less indispensable to the practical activity than to art and philosophy.
The will and the unknown.
It will seem that the will thus becomes will of the unknown and is at variance in too paradoxical a manner with the sayings, so clearly evident, that voluntas quae non fertur in incognitum and ignoti nulla cupido. But those sayings are true only so far as they confirm the fact that without the precedence of the theoretical act, the practical act does not take place. Apart from this signification, it should rather be maintained that noti nulla cupido and that voluntas non fertur in cognitum. What is known exists, and it is not possible to will the existence of what exists: the past is not a content of volition. The will is the will of the unknown, that is to say, is itself, which, in so far as it wills, does not know itself, and knows itself only when it has ceased to will. Our surprise when we come to understand the actions that we have accomplished, is often not small; we realize that we have not done what we thought we had done, and have on the contrary done what we had not foreseen. Hence also the fallacy of the explanations that present volitional man as surrounded with things that he does or does not will; whereas things, or rather facts are the mere object of knowledge and cannot be willed or not willed, as it is unthinkable to will that Alexander the Great had not existed, or that Babylon had not been conquered. That which is willed is not things but changes in things, that is to say, the volitions themselves. This fallacious conception also arises from the substitution of abstractions and classes of volitions for the real will.
Critique of the concept of practical sciences and of a practical philosophy.
It is to be observed, finally, that the erroneous concept of a form of science called the practical or normative has its roots in the concept of the end, of the good, of concepts and judgments of value as original facts. When practical concepts and judgments, as a special category of concepts and judgments, have been destroyed, the idea of a practical and normative science has also been destroyed. For this reason, the Philosophy of the practical cannot be practical philosophy, and if it has appeared to constitute an exception among all philosophies and that above all others it should preserve a practical and normative function, this has arisen from a verbal misunderstanding that is most ingenuous and most destructive. For our part we have striven to dissipate it, even in the title of our treatise, which, contrary to the usual custom, we have-entitled not practical, but of the practical.
[1] Bandello, Novelle, i. 40, intro.