The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic. Benedetto Croce
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[Pg xxviii] 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