The elementary forms of knowledge--Philosophy as the pure concept--
Development of Croce's theory of history--The identity of history and
philosophy--Subjectivity and objectivity--Distinctions and divisions
of history--The historical determination of philosophy--The economic
theory of science--The natural sciences--History and science--The
naturalistic method and the concept of nature--Mathematical processes.
The result of Croce's inquiry into the forms of man's theoretical
activity can be summed up by saying that there are two pure theoretical
forms, the intuition and the concept, of which the second can be
subdivided for convenience' sake into the definition and the individual
judgment; and two modes of the practical elaboration of knowledge, the
empirical concept and the abstract concept, from which are derived
the classificatory judgment and the judgment of numeration. Already
in æsthetics we have found no rigorous criterion of distinction
between the general intuitive activity of man, as it manifests itself
in language, and those empirically constituted bodies of particular
intuitions, which we call Poetry and the Arts: every man is a poet
and an artist, though we reserve these names only for those among
ourselves in whom the æsthetic activity manifests itself in a
higher degree, dominates the whole life of the individual spirit.
The concept and the pseudo-concepts are also elementary, fundamental
forms of knowledge, of which all men partake: every man, as he is
a poet, is also a philosopher and an historian, a scientist and a
mathematician: but, again, we reserve these names only for the most
conspicuous manifestations of those common spiritual activities, and
form the empirical concepts of Philosophy and History, of Science and
Mathematics. We may speak of vulgar knowledge and of pure or scientific
knowledge, but only by approximation and without forgetting that the
only claim to rationality and intelligibility on the part of pure
knowledge lies in its relationship with the elementary forms, in the
same way as Poetry owes its power and beauty to the language in which
it spreads its roots. A particular treatment of these higher degrees
of knowledge is not, therefore, logically justified; the problems
that they present are the same that have been met with in the general
discussion of the theoretical activity, and all they will have to offer
will be but a confirmation, and in some points a clarification, of what
has already been said.
As Art is intuition, so Philosophy is the pure concept: it is easy to
see that all the formal definitions of Philosophy that have ever been
given, as science of the first principles, of the ultimate causes, of
the origins of things, of norms, of values, of categories, are mere
verbal variants of the pure concept. Even the most materialistic and
realistic philosophies, since matter itself or nature or reality are
assumed by them as principles of universal validity, as concepts or
ideas, fall within the limits of this definition. In this sense there
is no philosophy which is not idealistic: the differences between one
philosophy and another are nothing but differences in the elaboration
of the pure concept. What follows from this identification cation of
philosophy with the pure concept is that all philosophies are, of
necessity, systematic, inasmuch as it is impossible to think the pure
concept as a singular or particular one, outside its relations with
the whole. This systematic character belongs to every philosophical
proposition, and not only to the actual systems of philosophy: the
solution of every particular philosophical problem implies a vision
of that problem in its universality, that is, in the system. We are
constantly reminded of this exigency by the fact that a new and
original elaboration of particular problems does actually react on the
whole of our thought; and that we are often compelled to revise our
fundamental opinions by the discovery of a difficulty which at first
presents itself in one sphere of thought only.
Of such a process, the whole of Croce's philosophy is a continuous
exemplification, but nowhere so clearly apparent as in the progress
of his conception of history. His first step had been that of
reducing history to the general concept of art, thereby emphasizing
the concreteness and individuality of history, as opposed to the
abstractness of the natural sciences, the concepts of which, in that
early stage, he could not yet distinguish from those of philosophy. In
the _Estetica_ the conception is still practically the same, history
resulting from the intersection of art and philosophy through the
application of the predicate of existence to the intuitive material.
In his first _Lineamenti di Logica_, history appears as the ultimate
product of the theoretical spirit, "the sea to which the river of art
flowed, swollen by the waters of the river of philosophy." But in the
same _Lineamenti_ he had not yet arrived at the identification of the
definition and the individual judgment, which in his second _Logica_
constitutes the final form of the pure concept, Croce's original
interpretation of Kant's _a priori_ synthesis. Between the first
and the second _Logica_, Croce wrote his _Filosofia della pratica_,
in which he denied the duality of intention and action, as in the
_Estetica_ he had denied the duality of intuition and expression: an
intention which was not also an action appeared to him, as we shall
see, inconceivable. It was by analogy with his treatment of this
duality, that he solved the duality between the concept (in the sense
of definition) and the individual judgment, which was also a duality
of philosophy as antecedent and history as consequent, as he perceived
that a concept which is not at the same time a judgment of the
particular is as unreal as an intention which is not at the same time
an action.
These are the successive steps by which Croce reached his doctrine of
the identity of history and philosophy, one of the most discussed and
of the least understood among his theories. We shall come back to it
later. But a few more hints on its meaning can already be given here.
It is clear that by introducing the predicate of existence as essential
to history Croce had already abandoned the conception of history as
pure, that is, non-logical, non-intellectualized intuition: but the
predicate of existence is insufficient to form a judgment, without
the addition of the other predicates, that is, of the whole concept.
The predicate of existence can only tell us that something exists,
but not what it is, that exists: the determination of the singular,
in its relations with the particular and the universal, is implicit
in the historical judgment, even when it is not openly enunciated.
Such judgments as: This thing is, or has been, seem to present the
proper form of the historical judgment; no other predicates than that
of existence are here visible, but my talking of _this thing_ implies
that I know what _this thing_ is; the other predicates are concealed
in the subject. Every historical statement is, therefore, a perfect
individual judgment. Its concrete and individual character, which Croce
had asserted in his early theory, is here maintained by the presence of
the subject, though the subject itself, in history, is seen not in its
intuitive purity, as in poetry, but as a concrete determination of the
concept. The identification of philosophy and history is not so much
the effect of a more intellectualized view of the historical processes,
as of the progressive consciousness acquired by Croce of the inherent
concreteness and individuality of the universal--of that realistic
view of the concept as expressed by his elaboration of the logical _a
priori_ synthesis.
The old distinction between a subjective and an objective treatment of
history receives a new light from the foregoing considerations. It is
impossible to make history without judgment, and, therefore, history
is in a sense irreducibly subjective. But the subjectivity of history
is not the arbitrary and capricious subjectivity of the individual
historian, who introduces his own passions and tendencies into the
historical narrative: it is the subjectivity of thought, of the earnest
and dispassionate research of truth, which coincides with the only
conceivable objectivity. What we call objective truth is not reached by
renouncing thought, but only by making our thought deeper and truer.
The historian who permeates with his thought his recreation of the
past (and if he did not, he would be recreating the past as poetry,
and imagination, not as history) needs not add a judgment of value to
his statements of fact: the identity of value and fact presents itself
once more to us in the intrinsic structure of the historical judgment.
Whatever the aspect of reality to which we turn our attention, true
history and true criticism coincide.
A consequence of this identification of history and philosophy is that
the only legitimate divisions of history are those that correspond to
the distinctions of the concept,--history of knowledge and of action,
of art, of thought, of the practical activity of man; and that the
relation among the different branches of history is similar to that of
the distinctions of the concept within the concept itself: that is,
the history of one particular form of human activity is nothing but
the history of the whole spirit of man as it realizes itself under
one of its aspects, a statement that we have already illustrated when
speaking of the history of art and poetry. Other divisions of history
are possible and useful, deduced from empirical concepts (such as the
state, the church, the drama, the novel, society, religion, etc.), but
they are divisions of practical convenience, mnemonic and didascalie
expedients, and not rigorous distinctions. Empirical concepts are,
in fact, in constant use in history, but as instruments, not as
constituents of historical thought. History is of the individual
_sub specie universalis_, and not of the practical generalizations.
This peculiar function of the empirical concept in history marks
the distinction between history and the natural sciences, the final
irreducibility of history to sociology.
As history is reduced to philosophy through the identification
of the historical with the individual judgment, so philosophy is
reduced to history through the identification of the definition with
the individual judgment. Since every philosophical proposition is
an answer to a given question, and every question or problem is
individually and historically determined, the whole course of the
history of philosophy is in constant function of the general course of
history. This is the truth contained in Hegel's formula of the identity
of philosophy and history of philosophy, which had been revived in
Italy, when Croce was meditating on these problems, by his friend
Gentile: a formula which he finally accepted and transformed into that
of the identity of history and philosophy, in accordance with his view
of philosophy as a moment or grade of the spirit of man. The _a priori_
synthesis which constitutes the reality both of the definition and
of the individual judgment is, at the same time, the reality of both
philosophy and history. The distinction between the two is a purely
didactic one: in the first the emphasis is laid on the definition and
the system, in the second on the individual judgment and the narrative.
But because the narrative includes the concept, every narrative
clarifies and solves philosophical problems, and, on the other hand,
every system of concepts throws light on the facts which are present
to the mind. The confirmation of the soundness of the system is in the
power it displays to interpret and narrate history; the touchstone of
philosophy is history. The concept, in affirming itself, conquers the
whole of reality, which becomes one with it.
We shall deal more briefly with Croce's treatment of the organization
of the empirical and abstract concepts in the natural and mathematical
sciences because his views coincide in their general lines with the
economic theory of science, which is the view of scientific method
elaborated by the scientists themselves in the last decades, and differ
from it only in so far as they are comprehended in a vaster system of
thought. Croce's polemic against pseudo-scientific philosophy, which
was amply justified at the beginning of his career, has now lost a
good deal of its actuality, since the ambitious attempts to organize
the concepts of science into a system of ultimate truth have finally
collapsed under the blows inflicted on their authors by science itself,
and are now relegated into a few academic and journalistic backwaters.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that his discussion of scientific
methods, though sufficient for his purposes, is far from being as
exhaustive as his discussion of either art or philosophy.
The natural sciences are systems of empirical concepts, that is, of
practical elaborations of knowledge, and, therefore, they do not belong
to the sphere of theoretical, but to that of practical activity. This
proposition must not be understood as referring to the practical
ends, or applications, of science: action requires a knowledge of the
individual fact with which we are to deal, and, therefore, the true
antecedent of action is not science, but an individual (or historical)
judgment. The natural sciences are not subservient to action, but
they are actions in the service of knowledge. Because of the empirical
and pragmatic character of their concepts, it is impossible either
to unify them in a single concept, or to divide them according to
rigorous distinctions. The natural laws which they evolve are the same
empirical concepts, which give rise to the creation of classes and
types, expressed in a different form; their empirical character is
confirmed by what Boutroux called their contingency, which is nothing
but the reflex of their arbitrary formation. Even the most general of
those laws, that of the constancy and uniformity of nature, assumed as
the foundation of so much pseudo-scientific thought in the nineteenth
century, is a mere postulate of practical opportunity, without which
it would be hardly possible to construct any science: it is the first
economic principle of scientific method, not an attribute of objective
reality.
The truth of the natural sciences, that truth of which they and their
empirical concepts are an abbreviated transcription, is the historical
datum, the knowledge of actual individual happenings. History is the
hot and fluid mass which the naturalist solidifies in the schematic
moulds of classes and types. The naturalistic discoverer is, therefore,
an historical discoverer and the revolutions of the natural sciences
are steps in the progress of historical knowledge. The difference in
method between history and the natural sciences is not due to the
supposed difference between a higher and a lower reality (spirit and
nature), or to the fact that nature has no history; nature is perpetual
activity and change, that is, history, as much as the spirit, but the
progress of nature is less clearly perceptible and less interesting
to us than that of the human reality, and, therefore, an abbreviated
transcription is more apt to satisfy our needs in relation to the
knowledge of what we call nature than to that of the spirit. The
nature that has no history, and which is opposed in dualistic systems
of philosophy to the spirit of man, is not the actual, historical
reality of nature, but the empirical concepts of the natural sciences,
their classes, types and laws, conceived as an objective reality and
substituted for that reality. In this sense, nature is not a special
object, but only a method of treatment, as is proved by the fact
that that same method, applied to the so-called higher and spiritual
reality, by such sciences as psychology, sociology, or comparative
philology, creates the same kind of naturalistic categories in the
domain of the spirit. It is of nature in this sense that the idealist
denies the real existence, since the time when Bishop Berkeley
repudiated matter as a mere abstraction. And here again, the scientist
comes to the support of the idealist with his keen awareness of
the pragmatic character of his hypotheses on the ultimate physical
constituents of reality.
It is through this theory of the natural sciences that Croce succeeded
in eliminating naturalistic transcendence from his thought, and,
singularly enough, his first impulse in this direction came to him
from his æsthetic studies, through his criticism of literary genres,
of grammars, of the particular arts and of rhetorical forms. He saw
how through them "nature" introduces itself, as a construction of the
human spirit, in the pure spiritual world of art; and having denied
its reality in art, he proceeded to discover it everywhere not as
reality, but as an product of abstracting processes. This must not be
interpreted as meaning that the naturalistic method is an illegitimate
hybrid: it has its uses in its proper place, and not less in the
study of mind than in the study of nature. It is only by mistaking
its constructions or fictions for realities, that we can be tempted
to deduce from the natural sciences a philosophy of nature, or from
the applications of the naturalistic method to art and to the history
of man, an æsthetics or a philosophy of history. But the natural
sciences themselves are not responsible for the errors of philosophical
naturalism. That such errors should not be limited exclusively to
philosophers, but very often appear within the body of sciences like
biology or psychology or sociology, is easily explained by the fact
that no scientist is a pure scientist: but poor philosophy does not
become science simply because it finds place in scientific books.
The quarrel between vitalists and mechanicists, for one instance,
is a philosophical (or historical), not a scientific dispute: and
it reveals itself, ultimately, as the opposition not of conceivable
realities, but merely of different methods in the elaboration of the
historical datum. The coherent and clear-minded biologist is to-day
a mechanicist, not because mechanism is the essence of reality, but
because it is the postulate of his research. The vitalist, on the other
hand, is inevitably brought by the trend of his thought to abandon
science and to become more or less deliberately a philosopher. It is
enough to mention in this connection such names as Driesch or Bergson.
The fictitious or conventional character of mathematics is still
more apparent than that of the natural sciences; and we shall not
add anything to what we have said in the preceding chapter about the
abstract concept, the non-concrete universal, which is the distinctive
process of mathematical thought. The application of the mathematical
processes, through the empirical concepts, to the historical datum,
gives origin to what we have called the judgment of numeration (and
mensuration), and to the mathematical sciences of nature. All that has
been observed of the natural sciences in general is valid for these
also. Their truth is still only the truth of the intuitive, historical
datum of which the empirical concepts are practical elaborations; the
addition of a further practical elaboration, the abstract concept,
can add to their mnemonic or, as it is more often called, technical
efficiency, but not to the value of their original content. This
process, as the purely naturalistic one, can be applied to the human as
well as to the natural reality, but it is evident that its usefulness
decreases in the passage from the one to the other, following the same
standards that apply to the natural sciences in general, those of the
relative perceptibility and importance of the individual happening.
It is at its highest in physics or astronomy, less notable in biology
or economics; practically inexistent in psychology or sociology, the
two sciences that suffer not less from the delusions of misapplied
statistics than from the invasions of cheap philosophy. Croce's theory
of science, as we have already remarked, differs from the generally
accepted methodology of modern science only in its context, which
is usually agnostic in, the pure scientist, while, in Croce, it
consists in the affirmation of the pure concept, or of the autonomy of
philosophy: a proposition with which the scientist qua scientist has no
reason to quarrel. In both cases, the autonomy of scientific thought
is only relative, and the difference of context is a difference in
the determination of its limits. In both cases, scientific thought is
recognised as thoroughly legitimate only within limits. The cry of the
bankruptcy of science, of which we heard so much a few years ago, is as
meaningless for Croce as for the pure scientist; science cannot become
bankrupt except by over-stepping its logical limits, that is, by first
ceasing to be science and becoming the ape of philosophy.
[Footnote 1: See _Logica_, part ii, La filosofia, la storia, etc., pp.
171-269.]