When, about a year ago, I undertook to write this little book for its
present publishers, all that I had in my mind was a brief exposition
of the solutions given by Croce to a number of philosophical problems
of vital interest to the students of what were once called the Moral
Sciences. I thought at the time that it would be possible to abstract
such solutions and problems from the body of his Philosophy of Mind,
which is a coherent and austere theory of knowledge of a kind that in
the modern decadence of philosophical studies and of general culture
is rapidly becoming unintelligible even to the most highly cultivated.
I hoped that the specialized reader, for whom the larger aspects of
Croce's thought have no appeal, and therefore no meaning, would be able
to apply those particular solutions to the problems that confronted him
in his particular branch of studies, by translating them into terms of
his own naïve philosophy.
This plan had also a personal advantage, inasmuch as it did not compel
me to a conscious revision of my own position in regard to those
larger aspects of Croce's philosophy. But as soon as I began to think
consistently of this book, the history of my own reactions to Croce's
work came back to me so vividly that I found it impossible to set it
aside; and I discovered that this supposed advantage was a delusion,
towards which I had probably been drawn by a very human, very natural
desire of avoiding the most obvious difficulties of my task.
As a young man, in my student days in Italy, I was a fervid and
enthusiastic follower of Croce's ideas: one of the many who used to
swear, as we were wont to say, _in verba Crucis._ To the generation
who opened the eyes of their intellect in the dawn of the century,
he had revealed what seemed to be the only safe path between the two
precipices of a pseudo-scientific materialism on one hand, and of a
mysticism on the other, which in all its many forms (traditionalism,
modernism, pragmatism, intuitionism, æstheticism, super-humanism,
futurism) could not be anything less than an abdication of thought for
the sake of the emotions. And it should not be wondered at, if Croce's
books, appearing at short intervals between 1900 and 1910, and building
up what presented itself to us as a complete system of answers to
all, or practically all, our most pressing spiritual questions, were
received by us with deep gratitude but with very little constructive
criticism. They covered such an enormous space on the map of European
culture, that even for the most ambitious among us, they were very
often the first introduction to entirely new fields of studies, and all
we could do was to follow our guide in his voyages of rediscovery: to
repeat within ourselves the strenuous experience of which each of those
books was a report and a testimony.
Impatience with a master who was not of the kind we had been accustomed
to, who could not be easily digested, surpassed and disposed of, but
had as much energy and courage, as light a step and as curious a mind,
as the most gifted among his pupils, prompted a good deal of immature
and capricious criticism, which was but a means for an arbitrary
liberation. It was an amusing sight to see Croce assailed and, to the
satisfaction of his critics, destroyed, with weapons that nobody could
have provided but Croce himself, and a dwarf victoriously brandishing
against the giant a toothpick for a sword. But there is no epic of
thought without such comic interludes.
My own faith in Croce was not shaken until intercourse with one of the
greatest critical minds of our day, and the representative of a totally
different philosophical tradition, a mathematician and a philosopher,
showed me the weakness of the foundations not of Croce's, but of my own
idealism. And a long residence in England, where I became intimately
acquainted with certain logical habits utterly unlike our Latin ways of
thought, made me profoundly sceptical of the intellectual advantages of
whatever dogmatism might have been in me. Yet I continued for a long
time to keep as it were in separate compartments those that had seemed
to me to be established truths in Croce's system, and speculations of
a quite different order on problems which were forced upon me by my
own experience of life and by contact with a new moral and cultural
environment.
All this was in the happy days of peace. The war from its very
beginning appeared to me, then living in one of the most purely
intellectual centres of Europe, at one of the oldest Universities
of England, as the catastrophe of our whole intellectual life. From
the trials of the war I emerged with infinitely less faith in the
value of our intellectual possessions than I ever had had before, and
at the same time with the firm conviction that intelligence, more
intelligence, a deeper, purer, more active, charitable, courageous and
pervasive intelligence, is our only hope for the future.
It was with such a disposition that I took up this work, and read what
Croce had been writing during the war. Three things, in the course
of this new acquaintance with him, and while I was meditating and
lecturing on him during my American peregrinations, became very clear
to me. The first, that his thought is not a system in the ordinary
sense of the word, but a method; that therefore it is impossible
to sever parts of his philosophy from the main body, the truth of
particular propositions being dependent upon an understanding of the
whole.
The second, that in the last few years the progress of his thought has
been so considerable that an attempt at giving a general exposition of
his philosophy without any regard to the successive stages of growth,
at describing as a static structure what is a dynamic process, would
inevitably lead to the construction of a fanciful system, of an image
totally different from the original.
The third, that whatever our individual position may be in relation to
his ideas, his work before, during and after the war will remain as the
most solemn contemporary monument of that intellectual civilization
of Europe, of which we have seen so many false idols, so many white
sepulchres, go under during these seven years of passion.
The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations was obvious:
first, that I had to give up my former plan, and this with no regret,
as I ought to have remembered what Croce has taught again and again,
that to the naïve philosophy of the specialist his own solutions of his
particular problems, however childish they may appear from a higher
standpoint, are perfectly adequate, that ready-made, formal solutions
are no solutions at all, and the only truth is the one that we conquer
by our own effort, under the impulse of our own need. And second,
that, however conscious I was and am of my own limitations, I had to
take a first step in the direction of constructive criticism by trying
to retrace the history, the ideal biography, of the philosophy of
Croce. With the exception of a little book written by Croce himself,
there is very little help to be found for a work of this kind in the
vast literature that has grown in the last twenty years, in Europe
and in America, around his work. And I firmly believe that there
is not one man in Europe or in America who is qualified to do that
work of creative interpretation which ought to be at the same time a
history and a criticism of Croce's philosophical activity: least of
all, the professional philosopher, who has dealt all his life with
the conceptual residuum of the problems of life, and has no direct
experience of any of them. Croce, as this little book will try to show,
has always come to the concept from the concrete, particular problem,
and has occupied himself with such a variety of problems, going into
them so deeply and so thoroughly, that a complete valuation of his work
will never be possible to a single man, but will _take place,_ will
_happen,_ in the history of the various disciplines, and in the general
history of thought, for years and years to come. For the present, and
as long as he will be alive and thinking, the only creative interpreter
of Croce is Croce himself.
This book does not therefore intend to substitute itself, not even as
a summary and a short cut for lazy minds, to the works of Croce. It
is rather an introduction to those works, and at the same time the
confession of one individual experience of that philosophy. It is
an historical sketch, and implicitly a criticism, since our way of
understanding a thought is our judgment of that thought (when not a
judgment that that thought passes on us); a sketch which I think I can
honestly write because so much of that philosophy has been the daily
food of my intellectual life, my own history, for years. Before the
war I should probably have been able to write it with less difficulty,
with more complete adhesion; but the perspective of these few years
will make it perhaps less passionate and more reflective. An explicit
criticism of the whole philosophy of Croce it is not, and it does
not attempt to be: the reader may find traces of my doubts and of my
preoccupations in it, but I have humbly tried to give not more, and I
hope not less, than what he has a right to expect from the title.
I do not write this book for the professors of philosophy. Those among
them who know Croce will not need it; and those who either have not as
yet taken any notice of him, or from a casual acquaintance with one of
his books have proceeded to damn most vigorously what they have hardly
understood, are certainly beyond my power. I write it for the young,
from the heart of my own now fast receding youth, trying to raise
before their eyes, in the words of Dante to Brunetto Latini,
_la cara e buona immagine paterna_
_di voi, quando .... ad ora ad ora_
_m'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna._
I trust that they will find in it what they need not less than we of an
older generation needed it, and what I know they are thirsting for: an
example of intellectual energy and of moral strength converging into
a life of unremitting devotion to the service of that truth which is
light and love and joy,--our only light against the menace of darkness.
Raffaello Piccoli.
Northampton, Mass., June-October, 1931.