There are philosophers for whom it is possible, and relatively easy,
to trace the roots of their speculations and of their systems in the
thought of one or a few predecessors. The research of what we might
call their sources, or more precisely of the terms in which certain
problems were handed down to them through the particular philosophical
tradition to which they belong, would probably not lead us very far in
space or very deep in time: it might be useful in such cases to preface
the history of their thought by a brief summary of these immediate
antecedents. But in the case of Benedetto Croce, such a summary ought
to extend, in relation to the problems in which he is or has been
interested, to the whole range of the history of human thought. This is
due partly to his peculiar approach to the problems of philosophy, and
partly to his method of work.
Philosophy is to him neither a special science nor a specialized
technique: not a discipline which requires a scholastic training, and
which you can definitely acquire after a given number of years of
study, but just what it was in the beginning: that love of wisdom
which prompts every man to the exercise of his thinking powers. The
problems of philosophy cannot be enumerated and defined, but that which
happens to you, or your own doings, in your life, in your conduct, in
your work, in your study, is the perpetually renewed material for your
meditation. Problems are not given to you from outside, as puzzles at
which you might try your skill or duties imposed by a pedagogue: they
are your experience, and your philosophy is your conscious logical
reaction to them.
This unprofessional and broadly human view of philosophy was not,
however, an obvious and spontaneous attitude of Croce's spirit, but a
laborious conquest. In the years of his erudite and unphilosophical
youth, at his first coming in contact with philosophy in the strict
and technical meaning of the word, with philosophical treatises and
dissertations, his attitude was one of profound respect for the
professors of philosophy, "as I was persuaded," (he tells us in his
autobiographical notes), "that they, as specialists, should possess
that abstruse science, of whose sacred curtain I had hardly lifted a
few folds, and I did not know that in a few years I should with wonder
and irritation discover that most of them did not possess anything, not
even that very little which I, merely by my good will to understand,
had succeeded in acquiring."[4] The fact is that these professors and
specialists could hardly be termed philosophers at all, while Croce had
already in himself that obscure and tormenting desire for intellectual
clarity, which is the beginning of philosophy.
But in this initial ignorance, in his coming as if unaware to the
gates of the temple, we shall find the reasons of Croce's method of
work. When a given problem presents itself to him, not as a subject of
learned controversy, but as a spiritual necessity, he becomes suddenly
conscious of the duty of following the history of that particular
problem through centuries of thought. The first impulse may come from
a mere attempt at understanding the terms under which the problem
presents itself to him: a clarification of words. His mental habits
are, in fact, those of the conscientious and painstaking philologist,
and he brings the method and discipline of the severest erudition into
the field of logic. There is no problem for him that is purely logical,
in an abstract and formal sense; still less, purely psychological. The
mere occasion for his speculation is sometimes offered, as we shall
see, by contemporary discussions, but he feels from the very beginning
that these discussions are merely concerned with the surface of things,
are taking place on a plane of thought, mechanical and dilettantesque,
on which all conclusions are equally legitimate and equally irrelevant.
Very soon, and long before any trace can be found in his writings of
his final identification of philosophy with history, he practically
identifies each problem with its own history, by retracing, generally
in an inversely chronological order, the original meanings of terms
and theories of which contemporary culture gave him only a pale and
distorted reflection.
But this intimate and vital contact with the past never leads him
to that attitude of reaction, which our forefathers typified in the
_laudator temporis acti,_ and which even to-day is so abundantly
exemplified by the scholar who, having laboriously climbed the
heights of the thought of one man or of one epoch, feels himself
in the possession of final truth, and smiles contemptuously on the
childishness of the moderns. He is as much on his guard against
the idols of the school as against the idols of the market place.
His relation to the great thinkers of the past is not one of blind
discipleship, but of critical collaboration. The favourite process of
his own thought might be defined as one of historical integration.
By emphasizing one aspect or another of Croce's philosophy, it is
possible, however, to connect him more particularly with one or another
philosopher. The name that is most frequently pronounced in this
connection is that of Hegel, probably because Hegel stands, in the mind
of the positivist and of the pragmatist, for a certain type of thought,
much more ancient than Hegel himself and practically coextensive with
the history of philosophy, rather than for what Hegelianism actually
is. The facile critic of Croce, who condemns and rejects him as a
Hegelian, would probably find it very hard to define the actual
points of contact between the two thinkers; but we know that the word
"Hegelian" is more a term of abuse, in such cases, than the expression
of a critical judgment. Croce himself has defined his attitude towards
Hegel, and generally towards the philosophers of the past, in the
conclusion of his examination of Hegel's thought: "I am, and I believe
one has to be, Hegelian; but in the same sense in which any man who
to-day has a philosophical mind and culture, is and feels himself, at
the same time, Eleatic, Heraclitean, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian,
Stoic, Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist, Cartesian, Spinozian,
Leibnitzian, Vichian, Kantian, and so on. That is, in the sense that
no thinker, and no historical movement of thought, can have passed
without fruit, without leaving behind an element of truth, which is an
either conscious or unconscious part of living and modern thought. A
Hegelian, in the meaning of a servile and bigoted follower, professing
to accept every word of the master, or of a religious sectarian, who
considers dissension as a sin, no sane person wants to be, and no more
I. Hegel has discovered, as others have done, one phase of truth; and
this phase one has to recognize and defend: this is all. If this shall
not take place now, it matters little. 'The Idea is not in haste,' as
Hegel was wont to say. To the same content of truth we shall come,
some day, through a different road, and, if we shall not have availed
ourselves of his direct help, looking back on the history of thought
we shall have to proclaim him, with many an expression of wonder, a
forerunner."[5]
This last hypothesis describes what actually happened in the case of
another among the ancestors of Croce's Philosophy of Mind. For two
centuries either unknown or misunderstood, Vico came into his own only
a few years ago, and mainly through the efforts of Croce himself. In
Vico, that is in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
practically all the germs of the idealistic philosophy, and of the
historical and critical culture of the nineteenth century, were already
present, as a natural development of the philosophical and humanistic
Renaissance. And it is through what, in Vichian style, we may call the
discovery of the true Vico, that Croce inserts himself in the central
tradition of Italian, and European, culture, and is saved from the
dangers inherent in his catholic attitude towards the philosophers of
the past, that of a material, mosaic-like eclecticism on one side, and
that of a metaphysical syncretism, such as led Hegel to the dialectic
constructions of his Philosophy of History, on the other.
The philosophy of the Renaissance, in which the fundamental impulses
that are the soul of that movement find their clear and distinct
expression, had produced a new naturalism and a new spiritualism
with Giordano Bruno and Tomaso Campanella: that is, two widely
divergent views of reality, which however had sprung from a common
source, the opposition to that scholastic synthesis in which all
the transcendental elements of Greek and Roman philosophy had been
gathered to the support of mediæval theology, in direct relation with
the mediæval description of the cosmos. There has probably never been
made in the world, either before or after the Middle Ages, such a
resolute and comprehensive attempt at an intellectual understanding
of the moral and material universe, as the one that is the work of
mediæval philosophy: but that attempt had been made possible, and had
brought definite results, only through the acceptation of the limits
of revealed truth, which, however freely accepted, proved in the end
to be much more compelling than to the modern scientist are the freely
accepted limits of external reality. Revealed truth could not be a mere
object of thought, as it carried within itself, under the mythological
disguise, its own metaphysics and its own ethics: a new principle, in
fact, a more absolute and intimate spirituality than had been known
to either the Greeks or the Romans, which attracted to itself all the
kindred elements in ancient thought, and determined the essential
characteristics of mediæval speculation.
The discovery and establishment of this spiritual principle, as a
universal reality which transcends nature and the spirit of man,
and which to this natural and human world is as a law dictated from
outside and from above, is the message of the Middle Ages, not in
pure philosophy only, but in religion and ethics, in science and in
the life of society. The Renaissance is the beginning of our modern
world, inasmuch as it is, through the infinite variety of its artistic,
social, religious, scientific manifestations, an effort to see that
same spiritual principle no longer as a transcending reality, but as
the active, immanent, all-pervading soul of immediate reality, both
natural and human. The Ptolemaic cosmography, which is the visible form
of mediæval thought, a system of the finite universe, of which the
Earth is the centre, and which leaves an infinite space for the seat
of the only real, transcending existences, beyond the compass of the
heavenly spheres, and as if it were outside itself, loses its hold on
the imagination, and therefore on the conscience of men, long before
Copernicus and Galileo read in the skies a new system of an infinite
universe, within which, or nowhere, the divine principle must live and
work.
The impulse towards the identification of the spirit with nature, on
one side, and with man on the other, had been at work in Italian life
and thought all through the Renaissance; but it is only at the end of
that miraculous spring of Western civilization, between the close of
the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, that it
expresses itself in the philosophies of Bruno and Campanella. Bruno
presents himself as an expounder and defender of Copernican astronomy,
and Campanella writes the apology of Galileo. And to each of them the
scientific discoveries are much more than mere helps and suggestions
for metaphysical speculation; they are the revelation, in one field of
human thought, of a new logic which has to be recognized, in one form
or another, as the fundamental principle of modern civilization.
Both in Bruno and Campanella, inert remnants of the ancient and
mediæval logic are still part of the structure in which their new
intuitions try to express themselves; but such remnants are to be met
with even in much later philosophers, and constantly reappear, as
blind spots in the active process of thought, in the whole history
of European philosophy down to our days. What is significant of each
thinker, what marks him as the legitimate interpreter of the deepest
spiritual life of his times, is not his system as a whole, but the
particular new intuition on which in each case the system is founded:
in Bruno, the conception of an infinite universe, and of the infinite
life of God in the universe; in Campanella, the affirmation of the
value of human experience and human consciousness, to which God is
present _per tactum intrinsecum,_ intrinsically, and in which knowing
and being coincide.
The two main directions of modern thought, or rather of all human
thought, are thus represented in the naturalism of Bruno and in the
spiritualism of Campanella, at the conclusion of the Renaissance,
respectively prefiguring the pantheism of Spinoza and the rationalism
of Descartes, that is, the two systems through which similar
conceptions became active and effective in all subsequent developments
of European philosophy. And it is useful to recall their names as
an introduction to the exposition of the ideas of a modern Italian
philosopher, because we are to-day only too prone to identify certain
forms of common European thought, originating from Greece and from
Italy, with what was only their last expression in the great idealistic
movement in Germany in the nineteenth century; where Bruno and Spinoza
reappear in Schelling, and Campanella and Descartes, through the
intermediary of the English thinkers of the eighteenth century, in Kant
and Hegel.
I am not trying to establish an Italian pedigree for the kind of
philosophy to which Croce belongs: nowhere are national distinctions so
futile as in the history of thought. But the Italy of the Renaissance
shares with India and with Greece the purely material privilege of
having given birth to a vision of the world and its problems, which is
national only in the sense that it was elaborated for a certain time at
least by minds belonging to a single nation. The value of that vision,
however, does not reside in any tribal or national characteristic, but
in those elements of universality, which made of the Italian culture
of the Renaissance, and of its inherent logic, the basis of all modern
European culture. What can still be recognized as peculiarly Italian,
or French, or English, or German in the thought of modern philosophers,
is not that phase of truth, which may be present in it, but the element
of prejudice, of crowd-mindedness, of spiritual inertia, which even the
greatest among them have in common with their weaker brothers.
In Bruno and Campanella we find an interest in certain problems of
thought, which we may call either religious or, more technically,
ontological: the problems of the relations of being and knowing. In
Vico, who is infinitely nearer to Croce in intellectual temper, the
centre of interest is shifted. Vico is apparently satisfied with
Catholicism as a religion; and he spends all his efforts in creating
a philosophy out of the purely humanistic and historical side of
Renaissance culture. And yet, long before Kant's _Prolegomena,_ he
foresees the necessity of the new metaphysics being the metaphysics,
as he says, of human ideas, and his theory of knowledge is founded on
a principle which bears an external resemblance to certain aspects of
pragmatism, but is in reality of a quite different, and much deeper,
character: that of the interchangeability of the _factum_ with the
_verum,_ of that which we make with that which we know. It was a
commonplace of the schools that perfect science is to be found in God
only who is the author of all things: Vico transfers this logical
formula from God to man, and applies it, in the first stage of his
thought, to mathematics, which appears to him as of man's own _making,_
in a narrow and abstract sense, and later to the whole world of history
and human thought and action, which, in a much truer and broader sense,
is _made_ by man.
Vico was brought to this second and final form of his theory of
knowledge by his studies on the history of law, of religion, of
language and poetry: his philosophy is essentially a philosophy of
the moral sciences, of philology in its widest meaning. And the whole
of his speculation, in his Scienza Nuova takes the shape of an enquiry
into the origins and development of human society: not essentially of
a sociology, an empirical and inductive science of man (though this
aspect is undoubtedly also present in his mind), but rather, through
"the unity of the human spirit that informs and gives life to this
world of nations," of an ideal and eternal history of mankind, a
philosophy of the human mind.
A contemporary and an antagonist of Descartes, Vico is one of the last
among European philosophers to embrace practically the whole range
of contemporary culture. But while Descartes lays the foundations
of his theory of knowledge on the certainty of mathematical method,
mistrusting the imperfection and vagueness of any other form of
science, Vico is enabled by his intimate contact with rhetoric
and history, with that _philology_ which had been the soul of the
intellectual life of the Renaissance, and which through the erudition
of his century was preparing the historical consciousness of the
following one, to anticipate the general principles of idealistic
philosophy and, on the theories of art, of language, of law, of
religion, as well as on a large number of particular historical
problems, the general development of subsequent European thought.
At a later stage in our exposition, we shall examine in greater detail
the indebtedness of Croce to Vico, especially as regards the theory
of art and language; but the similarities of circumstance and of
temperament between the two philosophers are already apparent. Both
Vico and Croce came to philosophy through erudition and philology; and
in Croce as well as in Vico, the fundamental philosophic attitude,
their theory of knowledge, their idealism (what in the case of Croce
has been called his Hegelism), is the intrinsic and necessary logic of
the same humanistic tradition, the natural outcome of the centering
of their intellectual interests on the history of the human spirit
rather than on the mathematical or natural sciences. It is only after
Descartes and Vico, and through the independent progress of scientific
thought in the last two centuries (during the Renaissance, science is
constantly in contact with philology, and there is no scientist who
is not also a humanist)--that the two divergent attitudes of mind
which we have seen exemplified in Bruno and Campanella, naturalism and
spiritualism, are finally divorced from each other, and respectively
linked with the scientific or with the historical aspect of modern
European culture. Rationalism, intellectualism, positivism, pragmatism,
on one side, are the more and more rarefied logics of science, in
its progressive estrangement from the humanities; and because of
the increasing prestige of scientific thought, we see them making
constant inroads even in the fields of the historical and philological
disciplines. Idealism, on the other side, represents in its many
forms the central tradition of European culture, and is heir to the
religious thought of the Middle Ages as well as to the humanism of
the Renaissance; but in many of its exponents, and to my mind, even
in some aspects of Croce's philosophy, it suffers from that same
condition of things which is the cause of the poverty and narrowness
of the so-called scientific philosophies: from that inability to
grasp both nature and the spirit of man, the world of science and
the world of history, which is a characteristic of our times. The
recurrence of the realistic position, after every great affirmation
of idealistic philosophy, is certainly not the mere recurrence of
error, the obstinate permanence of human folly after the pronouncements
of wisdom, but rather the restatement of a logical exigency which
cannot be entirely satisfied and disposed of by any of the idealistic
solutions of the problem of reality. Idealism and realism in modern
philosophy are two distinct and divergent elaborations of different
fields of modern culture: that unity of the intellectual vision, which
is perfect, within its accepted limitations, in mediæval philosophy,
and which is never entirely lost sight of in the thought of the
Renaissance, is the goal towards which both realism and idealism
continually tend, but which will not be reached by either, until the
_disiecta membra_ of our intellectual consciousness will be brought
together through a higher synthesis than the one from which they fell
apart at the end of the Renaissance.
We are now in a position to understand why it would be vain to look
in the work of Croce for either an organized synthesis of scientific
thought, understood as a means through which the mind of man grasps the
reality of nature, or a system of metaphysics attempting to explain
the facts of our human life by reference to an order of superhuman and
supernatural realities. These are two types of philosophy, a criticism
of which is implicit in every step of Croce's philosophical career,
as well as in the quality of his philosophical ancestry. But in their
place we shall find a series of meditations on the problems of the
human spirit in its actual historical development; on the distinctions
and inter-relations of the various forms of spiritual activity, not
as they appear, in a purely abstract and external consideration, to
the eye of the psychologist, but as they reveal themselves in the
intimacy of those spiritual and historical processes, in which man
creates at the same time his own being and his own truth. As we have
stated already, the philosophy of Croce is essentially a philosophy of
the humanistic tradition, of that Italian and European tradition the
consciousness of which seems to be fast disappearing even among those
who consider themselves as its exponents and defenders; and which in
his thought not only justifies and understands itself, but brings that
justification and that understanding to a greater depth, to a more
comprehensive clarity, than it ever reached during the many centuries
of its existence.
[Footnote 4: _Contributo_, p. 26.]
[Footnote 5: _Hegel,_ pp. 147-8.]