The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic. Benedetto Croce
sense that it alone constitutes the fact: every action diverges by necessity and by definition from succession or happening. If I return home every day by the usual road, my return home is every day new and different from that which might have been, imagined. This often amounts to a diversity of particulars which we may call of least importance, but which yet are not for that reason the less real. On the other hand, no action, however vain it be held (if it be action and not velleity of action and intrinsic contradiction, or by as much as it is action and not imagination and contradiction), passes without trace and without result.
If any action could be rendered altogether vain, this same rendering vain would invade all other actions and no fact would happen.
Action and foresight: critique.
The current proposition that we cannot act without foreseeing is also incorrect. Since the conception of foreseeing is contradictory, and since we cannot know a fact if it be not first a fact, that is, if it have not happened; if the contradictory hypothesis held, it would be impossible to act. But the truth is that what is called foreseeing is nothing but seeing; it is to know the given facts and to reason upon them with the universals. That is to say, it is the invariable theoretical base of action, already illustrated. When we will and act, what we will and do is our own action itself, not that of others or of all the others, and so is the resulting event. Voluntas fertur in incognitum, but the all intent upon itself does not take count of the unknown, which is in this case relatively unknowable and, therefore, relatively non-existent. The individual is aware that when he acts, he does not aim at anything but the placing of new elements in universal reality. He takes care that they shall be energetic and vital, without nourishing the foolish illusion that they must be the only ones, or that they alone produce reality. A popular little tale tells how God, who had at first granted to men to know their future lives and the day of their death, afterwards withdrew this knowledge from them altogether, because He perceived from experience that such knowledge made them lazy and inert. The new ignorance, on the other hand, revived and impelled them to vie with one another in activity, as though it had been granted them to obtain and to enjoy everything.[1] How can we doubt that our good and energetic work can ever be rendered nugatory in the event? That is unthinkable, and the saying fiat justitia et pereat mundus is rectified by that other saying: fiat justitia ne pereat mundus. Bad is not born from good, nor inaction from action. Every volitional man, every man active in goodness, is a contradiction to that one-sided attitude in which the will is suppressed to give place to happening, a world unmade is believed to be already made, arms are crossed or the field deserted. But it also contradicts the fatuous security that the future world will conform to the ends of our individual actions taken in isolation; saying with the good sense of the Florentine statesman, that we ourselves control one half of our actions, or little less, Fortune the other half. Hence our trust in our own strength; hence, too, our apprehension of the pitfalls of Fortune, continually arising and continually to be conquered. This constitutes the interior drama of true men of action, of the political geniuses who have guided the destinies of man. While the unfit is all anxiety, or bewilderment and depression, the fatuous is all over-confidence or expectation of the impossible, also losing himself in bewilderment when he finally discovers that the reality is not what he imagined. Hence also the serenity of the sage, who knows that whatever happen there will always be opportunity for good conduct. Si fractus illabatur orbis, there will always be a better world to construct. Hope and fear are related to action itself in its becoming, not to its result and succession.
Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action from its success.
We can illustrate the fact that no one seriously thinks of valuing an action according to its success, but that all value it at its intrinsic value as action, from the circumstance that no one recognizes any merit to the action of a marks-man who hits the bull's-eye, when shooting at the target with closed eyes; whereas no little merit is recognized to him who, after having taken careful aim, does not hit the mark but goes very near it. We are certainly often deceived in our practical judgments, and fortunate men are continually praised to the skies as men of great practical capacity, while the unfortunate are hurled into the mire as incompetent; for we do not distinguish exactly between action and success. This is not only so as to judgments of the present life: it is also true of the life of the past, of the pages of history, where imbeciles are made heroes and heroes calumniated; to the worst of leaders is attributed the honour of victories, ridiculous statesmen credited with ability. On the other hand, the sins of madmen are attributed to the wise, or they are accused of faults that are nobody's fault, but the result of circumstances. In vain will the Pericleses of all time ask, as did the ancient Pericles of the people of Athens, that the unforeseen misfortunes of the Peloponnesian war should be attributed to him, provided that by way of compensation he might have praise for all the fortunate things that should also happen παρὰ λόγον.[2] All this depends upon an imperfect knowledge of facts more than upon anything else: hence the necessity of criticism. Just as the work of the poet and of the painter is not materially to be laid hold of in the poem or in the picture, but requires a re-evocation that is often very difficult, so the work of the man of action, which is in part fused in events and partly contained in them, as a bud that will open in the future, asks a keen eye and the greatest care in valuation. The history of men of action and of their deeds is easily changed into legend, and legends are never altogether eliminable, because misunderstanding or error is never altogether eliminable.
Explanation of apparently conflicting facts.
On the other hand, certain commonplaces seem to be in opposition to the criterion itself: for example, that men are judged by success and that it matters little what we have willed and done, when the result is not satisfactory. There are also certain popular customs that make individuals responsible for what happens outside their own spheres of action, not to mention the well-known historical examples of unfortunate leaders crucified at Carthage and guillotined at Paris, for no other cause in reality than that of not having won the victory. And there is also the insistence of certain thinkers upon the necessity of never distinguishing the judgment of the act from that of the fact. But such insistence is nothing but a new aspect of the implacable struggle that it has been necessary to conduct against the morality of the mere intention and against the sophisms and the subterfuges that arise from it; an insistence that has expressed itself in paradoxical formulæ, as are also paradoxical the trivial remarks of ordinary life that have been mentioned. As to the customs and condemnations narrated by history, these were without doubt extraordinary expedients in desperate cases, in which people had placed themselves in such a position that it was impossible or most difficult to verify intentions and actions, and to distinguish misfortunes from betrayals; and as all expedients born of like situations sometimes hit the mark, that is to say, punish bad faith, so will others increase with irrationality the evil that they would have wished to diminish, since in those cases there has not been any bad faith to punish and to correct.
[1] Arch. p. lo st. d. trad, pop., of Pitré (1882), pp. 70–72.
[2] Thuc. ii. 64.
VI
THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, THE HISTORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL
With these last considerations, we are conducted to the theory of practical judgments, that is, to those judgments of which we have demonstrated the impossibility, when their precedence to the volitional act was asserted; but their conceivability as following it, indeed their necessity, is clear, by the intrinsic law of the Spirit; which consists in always preserving or in continually attaining to full possession of itself.
Practical taste and judgment.
But we must not confound the practical judgment with what has been called practical taste, or the immediate consciousness of value, or the feeling of the value of the volitional act. None can doubt that such a taste, consciousness, or