Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small town in the Italian
province of Aquila, the only son of an old-fashioned, Catholic, and
conservative Neapolitan family. His grandfather had been a high
magistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents in his devotion to
the old régime and to the Bourbon dynasty then reigning in Naples. His
father followed the traditional maxim of the "good people" of Naples:
that an honest man must take care of his family and of his business,
and keep away from the intrigues of political life. His mother was
a woman of culture and taste, such as the old type of education
for women, which is now as completely forgotten as if it had never
existed, used to produce. Bertrando Spaventa, the philosopher, and
Silvio Spaventa, a statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for the
national cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan conservatism, were
her brothers: both of them, however, estranged from Croce's family
because of their political ideas.
The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmosphere, in which the only
touches of colour were added by his own passion for books of history
and romance, and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to which
he accompanied his mother. To the circumstances of his childhood, Croce
attributes the relative delay in the development of his political
feelings and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests in
literature and erudition. But because every fault brings with itself
some compensation, he also owed to them his critical attitude towards
partisan political legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric of
liberalism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, and of any
kind of pomp and ceremony, together with a power to appreciate what is
useful and effectual in the actions of men, wherever it may come from.
As a boy, he went to a Catholic "collegio" or boarding school, and
in this too his experience differed from that of the majority of his
contemporaries. The insistence on lay education imparted by the State,
and the preference for the day school, which allows the family to
supplement the work of the school, in fact, to take care of the moral
and social side of education, as distinct from the purely intellectual
one, are characteristics of the new Italian methods, obviously in
keeping with the general tendencies of the age. I remember that to
myself as a boy it was inexplicable why anybody should be sent to a
"collegio" unless he were an orphan or an unmanageable scamp. But Croce
seems to have enjoyed his experience, to which he was submitted merely
in accordance with the habits of his family; and even now he praises
the system for breeding in him those feelings of loyalty and honour,
which are the result of life in common with boys of one's own age, and
of the necessity of adapting oneself to a variety of dispositions and
temperaments.
Classical secondary education in Italy roughly corresponds in its
scope, even to-day, to that which is imparted in Anglo-Saxon countries
by secondary schools and liberal colleges. It is supposed to end the
"formative" phase of education, and to lead to the higher phase in the
Universities, which is, whether cultural or professional, of a highly
specialized and "informative" kind. It is the direct outcome of the
humanistic tradition, and rather more so in the clerical schools, like
the one which Croce attended, than in the public ones. By the time he
was ready for the University, he must have had a good knowledge of the
classics, as a general background to a mainly literary and historical
culture, in which the elements of scientific knowledge, and a good deal
of mathematics, had also their place.
The religion which played such an important part in his family and
school life was probably little more than a habit with him: a set
of answers to certain fundamental problems which, accepted on the
authority of parents and teachers, released his mind for the pursuit
of his favourite studies. And yet, there is no doubt that we can
find traces of this religious education in all his work: a personal
experience of the catholic catechism and of catholic morality brings
a spirit in contact with some of the great ideas and of the great
realities of life in a much more intimate and profound way than the
purely intellectual apprehensions of the same ideas and realities ever
will. It creates habits of mind and moral tastes which will still be
recognizable even after the individual mind to which they belong has
undergone the most radical changes. In a philosopher, in particular, it
forms a kind of personal background to thought, similar to that which
modern philosophy actually has in its own history: it reproduces in the
youth of one man that religious phase which corresponds to the youth of
a civilization, and is the source of the intellectual development of a
more conscious age. At intervals during his adolescence, Croce's faith
intensified itself into passing aspirations towards a life of devotion,
until it quietly vanished, so to speak, from his consciousness, through
no great dramatic crisis, but merely in consequence of a course
of lessons on the philosophy of religion, which were intended to
strengthen it and make it more resistant to criticism, during the last
years of his secondary education. At about the same time, having come
under the influence of both Carducci and De Sanctis, he began to write,
and contributed his first articles to a literary weekly, the _Fanfulla
della Domenica_, which represented the most vigorous and advanced
tendencies of the day.
In 1883, in the earthquake of Casamicciola, in the island of Ischia
near Naples, Croce lost both his parents and his only sister, he
himself remaining buried for several hours under the ruins, and broken
in several parts of his body. The years immediately following were
the "saddest and darkest" of his life, and he spent them in Rome in
the house of his uncle Silvio Spaventa, which was one of the most
conspicuous political and intellectual centres of the capital of
the new kingdom. Spaventa was one of the leaders of the Right, or
Conservative party, which had been thrown out of office by the Left, or
Liberal party, a few years before; by him and by his friends the young
Croce was strengthened in his mistrust of the prevailing ideas and
methods, which he heard bitterly and sarcastically criticised by men of
great culture and of profound political honesty. While his temperament
and the shadow of his grief kept him away from the brilliant social
life of the Roman _jeunesse dorée_ his relations with the men of a
party which had little hope of ever coming back to power prevented him
from taking any part in active political life, in sharp contrast with
the habits of the majority of Italian university students, to whom
politics are what the major sports are to Anglo-Saxon students. He
divided his time between the University and the great Roman libraries,
among which the one he loved best was the Casanatense, in those years
still served by Dominican monks, a typical old monastic library, its
benches provided with old-fashioned inkhorns, sandboxes with golden
sand, and goose-quills. Anyone seeing him there, buried among his
ancient and curious books, and not suspecting the deep perpetual
dissatisfaction and unhappiness which accompanied him in a work which
seemed to be but a work of love, would have prophesied for him the life
of one of those ascetics of erudition, intoxicated by the romantic dust
of the past, who still haunt the solemn halls and the dark corridors of
the libraries of the old world.
But the great event of his University life, the one which awakened
him from the torpor of mere erudition, and set before him a new goal
and a higher hope, was the lessons on moral philosophy which he heard
from Antonio Labriola. Croce himself has described this new, decisive
experience: "Those lessons came unexpectedly to meet my harrowing need
of rebuilding for myself in a rational form a faith in life, and in
the aims and duties of life; I had lost the guidance of a religious
doctrine, and at the same time I was feeling the obscure danger of
materialistic theories, whether sensistic or associationistic, about
which I had no illusions at all, as I clearly perceived in them the
substantial negation of morality itself, resolved into a more or less
disguised egotism. Herbart's ethics taught by Labriola restored in my
mind the majesty of the ideal, of _that which has to be_ as opposed
to _that which is,_ and mysterious in its opposition, but because of
this same mysteriousness, absolute and uncompromising."[1] Labriola's
influence on Croce was not limited to the classroom; the professor
and the student became friends, and Croce enjoyed the benefit of his
wonderful gifts as a conversationalist, on which even more than on
his academic activity, or on his published work, his fame rests. He
seems to have been an awakener of souls, an intellectual stimulant in
the fashion of the Greek philosophers, a breaker of new paths and a
spiritual guide such as a younger generation had in the mathematician
Vailati.
The mind of the young scholar is henceforth constantly occupied by
meditations on the concepts of pleasure and duty, of purity and
impurity, of actions prompted by the attraction of the pure, moral
idea, and of actions which result in apparent moral effects through
psychic associations, through habits, through the impulse of the
passions. It is easy to discover the dependence of such meditations on
the early religious education of Croce; they are the link, in fact,
between his religion and his philosophy, since we find them, at a
more mature and elaborate stage, reflected in the third volume of his
_Philosophy of Mind,_ which, to the eyes of its author, has still an
almost autobiographical aspect, entirely concealed from the reader by
its didascalic form.
The plan of life that he sketched for himself about this time, was a
distinctly disillusioned and pessimistic one: on one hand, he would
pursue his erudite and literary work, partly because of his natural
inclination towards it, and partly because one has anyhow to do
something in this world; and he would, on the other hand, fulfil his
moral duties to the best of his capacity, conceiving them to be above
all _duties of compassion._ In later years he criticised this view as a
purely selfish one, since "the true and high compassion is that which
one practices by setting the whole of one's self in harmony with the
ends of reality, and by compelling others too to move towards those
ends, and a kind heart makes itself truly and seriously kind only
through an ever broader and deeper understanding."[2]
After three years of residence in Rome, Croce returned to Naples, where
he lived in the society of curious and learned old men, librarians
and archivists, all absorbed in minute and painstaking historical
researches. The moderate fortune which he had inherited from his
parents gave him the independence he needed for his quiet, laborious
tastes, and allowed him gradually to collect in his own house a very
large and precious library. To it he owed also the possibility of
learning without teaching, and therefore of keeping his own work
entirely free from any academic taint: of subordinating his studies
rather to the necessities of the development of his own personality
than to those of professional specialization.
Practically all the production of the years between 1886 and 1892 is
concerned with one aspect or another of the history of Naples. Through
his researches on the Neapolitan theatres, on Neapolitan life in the
eighteenth century, and on the literature of the seventeenth century,
he acquired an intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the minutest
literary, political, social and archæological details of that life
of his own city, which was the immediate historical background of
his own life. Towards the end of this period, this complex activity
crystallized itself into two rather ambitious enterprises: the editing
of a _Biblioteca letteraria napoletana_, for the publication of texts
and documents of Neapolitan literature; and of a periodical, _Napoli
Nobilissima_, which in the fifteen years of its existence collected an
enormous amount of material for the history and archæology of Naples,
and to which Croce himself contributed the essays of his _Storie e
leggende napoletane_.
We have here a Croce, who, though not a professor, was yet truly a
specialist: one of that great host of local and municipal historians
which are to be met with in even the least important Italian towns.
And undoubtedly this kind of activity offered him, as he willingly
acknowledges, not only an outlet for his youthful imagination, in
the reconstruction of an adventurous and picturesque past, but a
formal discipline of precision and thoroughness in scientific work.
But it must be remembered that municipal or regional history in Italy
has in many cases the breadth and depth of national history in other
countries, because of the number and variety of divergent political,
literary and artistic traditions which are present in the life of each
Italian city or state. And Naples, though she never had as preponderant
a part in the formation of the national consciousness as either Rome
or Florence, was a world in herself, with her own art and poetry, with
her own philosophical and political tendencies, with her peculiar
relations to non-Italian states and cultures, such as France and Spain.
Croce's Neapolitan researches, however specialized and barren they
may appear at first sight, were therefore well fitted to give him,
in one particular instance, that direct and concrete experience of
historical reality, of a complex and variegated historical reality,
which is among the necessary premises of his philosophical thought.
They gave him also a clearer consciousness of the processes of thought
which were naturally connected with that particular experience, and
they thus helped him to penetrate the minds of his two great Neapolitan
predecessors, Vico and De Sanctis. And finally, especially through
his interest in the cultural relations between Naples and Spain, they
enlarged his horizon from the problems of local to those of general
European history.
He visited, always as a scholar, not only Spain, but France and
England and Germany, constantly widening the range of his excursions
in libraries and archives. But the more he acquired of the knowledge
of individual facts, the deeper he felt the futility and vacuity of
their purely material accumulation. There was no end, apparently, to
the labor of research and erudition, unless a guiding and limiting
principle should be found: by the mere piling up of historical
information, however minute and exact, it would be forever impossible
to decipher the secret of the past. No amount of erudition would ever
make history. It is no wonder that to a mind which already had been
preoccupied with religious and moral problems, the problem of its own
work should present itself with the same intensity and in the same
shape as a moral experience. He began to feel a satiety and distaste
for that which he had once thought would be the labour of his whole
life, and a yearning for a more satisfying, more _intimate_ form of
activity. He felt a vague attraction towards a new type of history,
moral history, in relation to which all his previous researches
appeared as a kind of amorphous and unconscious preparation. He planned
a book on the psychological and spiritual history of Italy from the
Renaissance to our own times, and he undertook a series of studies
on the relations between Spain and Italy, to be followed by similar
work in regard to the other nations of Europe, as necessary to a full
understanding of his main theme.
But his old methods and habits followed him in the new field: again
it seemed to him that there would be no end to his merely preparatory
work, once he had undertaken it in what was practically still his old
spirit. In fact he had sensed a spiritual need which had announced
itself by that peculiar feeling so closely resembling one of moral
dissatisfaction, but he had not been able as yet to formulate the terms
of his problem. It is probable that what kept him for quite a long time
from doing so was partly the character of his literary education, and
partly a kind of intellectual humility, which made him distrust his own
powers, on entering into a completely new form of mental activity.
The problem which he had to solve for himself was, indeed, not an
historical, or philological, or archæological one, but a purely
philosophical one: the problem of the nature of history and of science.
We know with what religious awe Croce regarded the professional
philosophers at the time; and certainly nothing could have been more
painful to the young and modest scholar than the thought of stepping
beyond the limits of his own specialty, and invading a ground so
powerfully occupied and defended. But Croce discovered through his
own experience that you cannot reject a problem, once it is forced
upon you by the facts of your own life, and that _philosophus fit_
with the same kind of necessity with which _poeta nascitur._ It is
from this point that we can observe the transformation of the young
scholar into a philosopher; his philosophical career will appear to
us as a continued effort towards the solution of that first problem,
and of all the problems which followed in its train. The last answer
to it is in Croce's theory of the identity of history and philosophy;
and the dependence of this theory on the first impulse from which the
whole of his philosophy arose is clearly visible in the desire which
he has again and again expressed and partly fulfilled in his latest
writings, of going back from abstract and formal philosophy to the
philosophy of particular facts or history: _storia pensata_; "since
this is the meaning of the identity of philosophy and history, that we
philosophize whenever we think, whatever may be the subject or form of
our thought."[3] The philosophy of Croce, which begins with the raw
material of history, presenting itself as a dense, impenetrable mass,
ends in a new conception of history, which is permeated in all its
parts by the vivifying breath of thought.
I may add here, since it will be very hard to interrupt the history
of his intellectual development with biographical details, that the
new direction of his thought did not alter Croce's external mode of
life; that the discipline acquired in his early work remained the norm
of all his later activity; that he accepted public offices in his
own town, and later as a senator (which in Italy is a life-office)
and as a Minister of Public Education in the last Giolitti Cabinet,
certainly more out of the consciousness of a moral obligation than
through his inclination or his ambition. His life on the whole has been
and is essentially that of the scholar and of the thinker: his work, a
political work only in the wide meaning which Plato gives to the word.
[Footnote 1: _Contributo,_ pp. 21, 22; and _passim_, pp. 1-30, for
practically the whole substance of this section.]
[Footnote 2: _Contributo_, p. 23.]
[Footnote 3: _Contributo_, p. 81.]