The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic. Benedetto Croce
the ground that it should have happened in a manner different from what actually took place, and describe how this should have been, is well justified. Whoever possesses historical sense, or even simple good sense, cannot but agree to this. The question should in reality be asked differently, and in this manner: Is it correct to apply to history the categories of judgment that we apply to volitions and single acts? Is it correct to judge in a utilitarian or moral manner historical events and the whole course of history? Rectified in these terms, the question becomes clear, and requires a negative answer. When we narrate artistic or philosophical, economic or ethical history, we place ourselves at the point of view of the individual activity. As we expose æsthetic or philosophical products, useful or moral actions, we judge them at the same time æsthetically, philosophically, economically, morally, and we know in every case if the action has been such as it ought. Who would hesitate to affirm that (at least, as an affirmative method) the Africa of Petrarch was not what he wished it to be, a poetic work; or that Emmanuel Kant did not succeed in establishing from his practical postulates, according to his intention, the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul; or that Themistocles behaved in an undecided manner as regards Xerxes, not knowing how to resolve to sacrifice his ambitions to the safety of Greece, nor to inflict a grave loss upon his country, in order to satisfy his desire for vengeance; or that Napoleon ignored the rights of man, and behaved as one without scruples, when he ordered the arrest and shooting of the Duc d'Enghien? But what can be the advantage of asking if the arrest of the Persian expansion in Europe were a bad thing or a good? if the creation of the Roman Empire deserve blame? if the Catholic Church were wrong in concentrating Western religion in herself? if the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the French of the eighteenth, or the Italian of the nineteenth, could have been avoided? if Dante could have been born in our day and have sung the Kantian rather than the Thomist philosophy? if Michael Angelo might have painted the victories of the modern industrial world, which Manzotti has made into a ballet in his Excelsior, instead of the visions of the Last Judgment? Here we have before us, not individual spirits, whose work we examine in given circumstances, but facts that have happened, and these are the work, not of the individual, but of the Whole. They are (as has already been said) the work of God, and God is not to be judged, or rather He is to be judged, but not from the visual angle at which individual works and actions are to be judged. He is not to be judged as a poet or as a philosopher, as a statesman or a hero, as a finite being working in the infinite. The contemplation of His work is at the same time judgment. Die Weltgeschichte das Weltgericht: the history itself of the world is the judgment of the world, and in recounting the course of history, while not applying the judgment of the categories above indicated, which are inapplicable, we do, however, apply a judgment, which is that of necessity and reality. That which has been had to be; and that which is truly real is truly rational.
But we cannot give the justification of this supreme judgment, of this world-embracing judgment (we repeat the refrain), until further on. Let it suffice for the present that in discussing the practical judgment we have limited it to all that part of history which contemplates actions, that is, to individual activity, to biography and to the biographical element, which is the material of all history. In it, the practical judgment is active and energetic, but is silent before the event, and every history is like an impetuous river of individual works, which flows into a sea, where it is immediately restored to calm serene. The rush of actions and of their vicissitudes, of victory and of defeat, of wisdom and of folly, of life and of death, are set at rest in the solemn peace of the "historical event."
Progress of action and progress of Reality.
As we have distinguished the practical judgment from the judgment of the event, the historical-individual from the historical-cosmic, so we must distinguish the concept of progress, as the progress which belongs to the volitional act and that which belongs to the event. The concept of progress (according to the explanations given elsewhere) coincides with the concept of activity. There is progress whenever an activity declares itself, whenever (not to leave the circle of the practical) we pass from irresolution to resolution, from conflict to the volitional synthesis, from suspense to action. But the event, which is no longer action but result, that is to say, is action, not of the individual but of the Whole, is not to be judged with that concept of progress, and in it progress coincides with the fact. That which follows chronologically, if it be truly real, represents a progress upon what precedes. Even illness is progress, if there were a latent crisis of health, and getting over it gives rise to more vigorous health. Even apparent regression (invasion of barbarians) is progress, if it lead to the ripening of a wider civilization. What is death for the individual is life for the Whole.—Hence the insipidity of the question, often proposed and still discussed by writers of treatises, whether there be practical progress, or as is said when limiting the question, moral progress.
From the individual point of view, at every new volitional act, practicality and the relative impulse of progress are once more born, and they are extinguished with that act, to be born again in a new one, and so on in a circle of infinite changes. As to cosmic reality, we must declare, as in the previous example of the course of history, that it is itself progress (which is also confirmed by the positivist philosophy, when it declares that reality is evolved), but this is progress of reality and therefore progress without adjective, or at least without practical or moral adjective.
Precedence of the philosophy of the practical over the practical judgment.
The intellectual element, which is constitutive in the practical judgment as in every other historical judgment, can also be called the philosophical element. Hence the consequence that a philosophy of the practical activity is a necessary condition of every practical judgment. This is another thesis of paradoxical appearance, which, however, it is not difficult to make plausible with suitable reflections, plausible at least to those who do not refuse to reflect. For what is philosophy but the thinking of the concept, and in this case the concept of the practical? The conclusion, then, that a philosophy is necessary for a judgment is irrefutable. The difficulty in admitting it comes from the false association of ideas, for which the sound of the word "philosophy" suggests the disputes of the schools, the treatise, the manual, or the academic lecture whereas we should think of philosophy in all its extension and profundity, inborn in the human spirit (we have elsewhere called this ingenuous philosophy) before its more complicated forms Every man has his own philosophy, more or less developed or rudimentary, more or less defective no one is without any philosophy. The first judgment on the practical activity is already guided by the light of a philosophical concept which, if it does not give a light, gives at least a glimmer, if not straight and certain, at the least undulating and tremulous, producing therefore tremulous and undulating judgments. Ingenuous philosophy and philosophy in the specific sense are not, therefore, separable from one another, with a clear-cut distinction, and if there exist a disability in pronouncing a judgment as to many people and to many actions, that arises from difficulties consequent upon the philosophy of the time, which must first of all be solved, before passing to the effective judgment. Hence long researches into doctrine are sometimes necessary. Thus it is difficult to do justice to the work of a rebel or of a revolutionary, without first clearing away prejudices and understanding what a revolution is, and the relative value of what is called obedience to the existing order of things. Thus it would be naive to condemn as faithless the Saxon regiments which deserted Napoleon on the field of Leipzig, or Marshal Ney, who returned to the service of Napoleon from that of Louis XVIII., unless we previously make clear the meaning and the limits of the political treaty and of the military oath, which cannot be the only unconditioned things in a world where nothing is unconditioned save the world itself.
Confirmation of the philosophical incapacity of the psychological method.
From the recognized precedence of philosophy over the practical judgment arises the confirmation of the impossibility of the psychological method as the foundation of a Philosophy of the practical. Descriptive psychology is based upon practical facts historically ascertained, or upon practical judgments. Hence, by proceeding from particular to particular, it is not only incapable of exhausting the infinite and of attaining to the real universal, but by the very choice of particular examples, which should be the foundation of philosophical research relating to the practical, it is under the necessity of first possessing a concept of the practical. Hence