The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic. Benedetto Croce
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