The unity of thought--The writing of the Estetica--The method of
philosophy--A philosophy of mind--The _Filosofia della Spirito_ and the
_Critica_--Other activities.
The salient feature of Croce's mind, fully displaying itself in the
maturity of his work, is a power to follow different lines of thought
and research, without either confusing the issues or losing sight of
the deep underlying connections. For the average scholar, an incursion
into alien ground will generally mark the abandonment of his former
interests; or, in the best hypothesis, the creation of a new mental
personality coexisting with the original one, but neither reacting on
it nor being influenced by it. The reason is obvious: the substance
of each personality is a cross-section of the body of one discipline,
which in its actual history, in its methods, associations and sphere
of interest, touches the other one at very few points only, if at any
at all. The establishment of new relations between the two requires
a new personal elaboration, a complete individual mastery of the
materials and methods of each discipline. We are hardly aware of the
independence gained by even very closely related fields of research
through the specialists treatment of the last century: how each of
them has developed, so to speak, a language of its own, which has its
foundation in the peculiar, and inevitable, terminology, but extends
far beyond it into the logical structure of the specialist mind. We
have more or less consciously built up a world (that is, an implicit
conception of the world, a naïve philosophy) for the economist, one
for the biologist, one for the mathematician, one for the student of
literature, and so on. The scholar with the dual personality lives
alternatively in separate and self-contained worlds; but to melt the
two images into a single one, is far beyond his power. In other cases,
he will relate all the experiences legitimately belonging to one
special world, to another one, probably to the one with which he was
first acquainted; but then we have those awkward hybrids, the economics
of the literary man, or the literature of the biologist, or the biology
of the economist; and the confusion is so apparent that it generally
reflects itself in the very quality of the terminology employed.
It was against this kind of confusion, against the transference of the
concepts of one science into another, which was the favourite device
of positivism, that Croce continually reacted in his criticism of
contemporary thought. He instinctively knew the value of distinctions,
and also the value of unity; but he would never pay for unity at the
expense of the fine, precise, necessary distinctions. This explains
why for a certain number of years he may have appeared as a man
occupied in the pursuit of two quite different and unconnected lines of
research: his literary friends used to look on his economic studies
with wonder and distrust, as on a strange whim and a total waste of
time, while the economists more or less resented the intrusion of the
outsider. But it explains also why, when he finally attempted to give
shape to the conclusions he had reached in regard to one particular
group of problems, his grasp of the essential unity and his power to
build an inclusive and unspecialized conception of reality, were made
visible at once. There was no special problem of thought which could be
treated apart from an either implicit or explicit view of the whole of
reality: there was no solution of any particular problem which would
not affect, and in turn be affected by, the solution of every other
problem. Or, to say the same thing in different words, philosophy was
a system, not in the sense that a rigid logical scheme could once
and forever fit the ever moving stream of reality, but because it is
impossible to think the distinctions without the unity, or the unity
without the distinctions. That which appears to us, psychologically,
as the main characteristic of Croce's mind, transforms itself into the
intrinsic logic of his system, in which the principles of unity and of
distinction are, as we shall see, fundamental.
In the year 1899 Croce had been compelled to spend a good part of
his time in a more or less practical activity in connection with the
Centenary of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, and it was only towards
the end of that year that he could dedicate himself entirely to
the work he had constantly had in mind since the publication of his
essays on literary criticism: the exposition of his concept of art
in the fulness of its relations and determinations. It will be well
to let Croce himself give us an account of that decisive moment, of
the ripening and gathering of his various speculations into their
first coherent and systematic expression. "When I started my work,
and began to collect my scattered thoughts, I found myself extremely
ignorant: the gaps multiplied themselves in my sight; those same things
that I thought I held well in my grasp wavered and became confused;
unsuspected questions came forward asking for an answer; and during
five months I read almost nothing, walked for hours and hours, spent
half days and whole days lying on a couch, searching assiduously within
myself, and putting down on paper notes and thoughts, each of which
was a criticism of the other. This torment grew much worse, when in
November I tried to set forth in a concise memoir the fundamental
theses of Æsthetics, because, ten times at least, having carried my
work up to a certain point, I became aware of the necessity of taking
a step which was not justified logically, and I started all over again
in order to discover in the beginnings the obscurity or error which had
brought me to that quandary; and, having rectified the error, again
went my way, and a little further I again stumbled into a similar
difficulty. Only after six or seven more months was I able to send
to the press that memoir in the form in which it has been printed
under the title _Tesi fondamentali di un' Estetica come scienza dell'
espressione e linguistica generale_; arid and abstruse, but from
which, once I had finished it, I came out not only quite oriented in
regard to the problems of the mind, but also with an awakened and
sure understanding of almost all the principal problems about which
classical philosophers have toiled: an understanding which cannot be
acquired by merely reading their books, but only by repeating within
oneself, under the stimulus of life, their mental drama."[1] We are
so used to see the intellectual worker surrounded and propped up by
libraries, laboratories, files, and statistics, that the sight of a
man abandoning his books, giving himself up to what by all material
standards must be classed as a state of idleness, in order to withdraw
into the intimacy of his own consciousness, there to find an answer
to the problems of reality, cannot but strike us as incongruous and
anachronistic. If we were frank about ourselves, we should confess that
our unbounded confidence in the purely material helps is merely a mask
for our deep-rooted scepticism, for our absolute lack of confidence
in the power of reason. What we cannot hope to attain through our
individual effort, we expect as the product of a great machine of
thought, in which man enters as a little wheel, accomplishing a
given function, as mechanical and impersonal as the rest of the
machine. We strive for objectivity, and believe in the automatic
fabrication of truth. Through a false analogy with the methods of the
natural sciences, imperfectly understood, and assimilated to those of
industrial production, we call this process scientific, and we pretend
to despise what we fear, the testimony of our consciousness and the
hardships of personal thought. Reason, the human reason, the ultimate
source of all knowledge, we pay lip homage to, but really put in the
same category as the obscure intuition of the mystic. Outside our
mechanical objectivity, we seem unable to see anything but an arbitrary
subjectivism, a capricious and empirical individuality.
But however incongruous and anachronistic it may appear to us, there
is little doubt that this method is the only philosophical method, the
method of philosophy in all times. Croce's originality consists merely
in having reasserted its validity in such sharp contrast to all the
tendencies of the age, and to have shown that true objectivity belongs
only to the truth we discover within ourselves, when the eye of our
mind is not turned on the transient spectacle of our superficial life,
but is reaching under it for that universal consciousness which is
the foundation of the individual one. There is no scholar who is as
exacting and punctilious as Croce in the choice and elaboration of his
material--as conscious of the need of thoroughness and precision--as
impatient of any form of improvisation; but he never forgets that
the end of all his labours is merely that of _knowing himself,_ in
the spirit of the ancient oracle, by acquiring a direct, intimate
experience of the processes through which a mind of to-day has come to
be what is truly is; of making his own individual consciousness partake
more and more of that universality which alone is true consciousness,
by liberating itself from all casual determinations, and becoming
historically acquainted with itself. It is easy to see how in such a
general attitude the road to philosophy is also the road to history;
and how both in philosophy and in history the final test must be not
that of the dead material, but of the living spirit.
The employment of such a method leads to two consequences: the first,
that a philosophy thus conceived will be a philosophy of the human
spirit--_Filosofia dello Spirito_--or, as we, following the habits of
English-speaking philosophers, shall tentatively call it, a philosophy
of mind; the second, that the universality which the individual spirit
discovers within itself, not being a static, immovable universality,
but merely the form of its ever-changing, historical actuality,
philosophy itself will be a continuous progress, and at no particular
moment will it be possible to define the thought of the philosopher as
a completed system. As we cannot, however, in the small compass of this
book, minutely follow all the successive modifications and accretions
of Croce's thought, we shall speak of the ten years between 1900 and
1910 as of the period in which the system of the philosophy of mind
was developed and determined, and we shall attempt in the following
chapters to give a general view of the system itself as it might have
appeared in 1910 to a conscientious student of all the works of Croce
published during that interval of time.
The _Tesi_ contained already the substance of the _Estetica come
scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale_ which was completed
in 1901 and published in 1902, and with which Croce definitely took
his place in modern philosophy. The book is divided in two parts, the
exposition of the theory and the history of the doctrine. But the two
parts are very closely related to each other, as the exposition already
criticises all the possible aspects of æsthetic theory, and the history
merely disposes the same criticisms in a chronological order, and
labels each of them with a name. This plan, with slight alterations, is
that of the successive volumes of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_: to the
reader who is already acquainted with the history of philosophy, the
historical character of the purely theoretical exposition is readily
apparent.
Soon after the publication of the _Estetica,_ Croce began to consider
his book merely as a programme and a sketch which needed filling in
with further developments,--with the investigation of the other forms
of human activity, which had been merely postulated in the study of
the æsthetic activity; and with a wide cultural work, to be carried
on especially by means of a review, through which his ideas should
be tested in immediate and constant relation with the problems of
contemporary Italian and European thought. The enormous activity of the
following years falls easily into this rough division. On one hand we
have the completion of the _Filosofia dello Spirito,_ with the _Logica
come scienza del concetto puro,_ the first edition of which appeared
in 1905 (_Lineamenti di una Logica,_ etc.), and the second, deeply
modified by his meditations on the practical activity, in 1909, with
the _Filosofia della Pratica: Economica ed Etica,_ written in 1908,
but of which some parts had already been given in 1907 in the memoir
_Riduzione della filosofia del diritto alla filosofia dell' economia_;
and with the new and fuller formulation of his Æsthetics in a paper
read to the International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1908,
on _L'intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell' arte_. To these must
be added the two monographs on Hegel (1906) and Vico (1910), which are
at the same time an exposition of their philosophies and a restatement
of Croce's own main positions, in so far as they coincided with those
elements of truth which he still recognized as living in their thought.
On the other hand we have the publication of a bi-monthly review, _La
Critica,_ the first number of which appeared in January, 1903, and
which is still being published. _La Critica_ announced itself as a
review of literature, history and philosophy, but it differed from
all other publications in the same fields in two main features: the
first, that the number of its contributors was practically limited to
two, Croce himself, and his friend Giovanni Gentile, with whom he had
first been brought in contact through their common interest in Marxian
studies, and who followed for some years at least a line of thought
which touched his own at many points; the second, that it imposed upon
itself a very definite programme of work, each number containing an
essay, or part of an essay, by Croce on some Italian writer of the
preceding half-century, and one by Gentile on the Italian philosophers
of the same period, besides a number of reviews of new Italian and
foreign books, and notes and comments on contemporary questions of
culture and moral life. In his own main work for the _Critica,_
Croce was at the same time aiming at giving concrete examples of the
application of æsthetic theory in the domain of literary criticism, and
at clearing the ground for the work of the new generation, through an
appraisement of the literary values of the preceding one. The general
temper of the review is clearly expressed in the following words
from the already so often quoted autobiographical notes: "The ideal
which I cherished was drawn not from my own personality, but from my
varied experience, because, having lived sufficiently in the academic
world to know both its virtues and its faults, and having at the same
time preserved a feeling of real life, and of literature and science
as being born from it and renovating themselves in it, I addressed
my censures and my polemics on one hand against dilettanti and
unmethodical workers, on the other against the academicians resting in
their prejudices and idling with the externals of art and science."[2]
The greatest part of the writings contributed by Croce to the _Critica_
during these years were later collected in volumes, of which however
only the _Problemi d'Estetica_ (1910), containing, besides the
Heidelberg lecture, a large number of essays both on the theory and
history of Æsthetics, appeared before the end of the period we are now
considering. To intensify the action of both his books and his review,
he initiated in 1906, in connection with the publisher Laterza of Bari,
the publication of a series of _Classici della filosofia moderna_, in
which he published his own translation of Hegel's Encyclopedia; and
in 1909, of the collection _Scrittori d' Italia_, which is in the way
to becoming the standard corpus of Italian Literature. He took also
a leading part in the editing of the same publisher's _Biblioteca di
cultura moderna_, which was enriched through his care and advice with
reprints of rare works of southern Italian writers of the Risorgimento
and of the early years of the Unity, and with translations of books
representative of foreign contemporary thought.
If we add to all this, a number of scattered essays and monographs,
editions of texts and documents, and bibliographies, and the generous
cooperation, extending from the friendly discussion of plans and ideas
to the humble reading of proofs, with a host of friends and disciples,
we have a fairly complete idea of the significance of Croce in the
cultural life of young Italy. He very rapidly became something like an
institution; he was hailed as the master and spiritual guide of the
new generation. His work and his example, the clarity of his thought
and the rhythm of his steady, harmonious, powerful activity, were an
element not of the limited life of the intellectual laboratory only,
but of the spiritual life of the nation.
[Footnote 1: _Contributo_, pp. 40-41.]
[Footnote 2: _Contributo_, p. 48.]