Philosophical introspection--Affirmation of the practical activity--The
category of feeling--The theoretical activity as the antecedent of the
practical--Identity of intention and volition--Identity of volition and
action--The practical judgment: philosophy and psychology --The problem
of free will: liberty and necessity--Croce's solution in the context of
his philosophy--The practical value: good and evil--The unreality of
evil, and the function of ideals--The sanction of evil--The volition
and the passions--The empirical individuality--Development and progress.
The reality of the practical activity as distinct from the theoretical
activity, of will as distinct from knowledge, can never be proved
through the naturalistic method of psychology, by merely pointing
to a class of facts--actions--different from another class of
facts--thoughts. The so-called action manifests itself, at a closer
analysis, as infinitely complex and rich in purely theoretical
elements; the so-called thought, as partly at least a work of the
human will. The concrete life of the spirit is always both practical
and theoretical, and the distinction we are looking for is an ideal
distinction, to be ascertained by the method of philosophical, not
psychological, introspection; by the direct witness of consciousness,
and by the deduction of its function in the concept of the spirit,
or of reality, as a whole. The complete affirmation of a form, or
grade, of spiritual activity is the philosophy of that form, and of
its relations with the others; in this case, the philosophy of the
practical, or of will. It is hardly necessary, at this stage of our
exposition, to observe that the philosophy of the practical will not
be practical philosophy, a collection of rules for the attainment of
the useful and the good, any more than the philosophy of art is a
collection of æsthetic precepts: it will be a purely formal science, a
universal concept, the content of which is the infinite wealth of the
individual determinations of the will, the history of the practical
activity.
In the following chapter we shall deal more particularly with the two
forms of the practical activity, economic and ethic, corresponding
to the two forms of the theoretical, æsthetic and logic. Here we
shall consider the undifferentiated practical activity, first, in its
relations, and then, in its internal dialectic. The contents of this
chapter are, therefore, intended as applying both to economics and
ethics, to the useful and to the good.
There are two typical forms of scepticism regarding the practical
activity. The first denies that it is a spiritual activity, by
denying that man is conscious of his will, in the process of willing;
consciousness comes only after, and is not consciousness of the will,
but of our representation of the will. Therefore, the will is nature,
and consciousness, or spiritual activity, is only our thought. The
second does not exclude the will from consciousness, but affirms that
there is no real distinction between will and thought. The first
doctrine is evidently founded on a confusion between reflected and
intrinsic consciousness; and maintains something that is always true
of reflected consciousness, not in relation to the will only, but to
every form of spiritual activity; carried to its extreme consequences,
it would banish consciousness from the whole life of human mind, since
every act of consciousness would always be consciousness of something
else, and never of itself. Against this view, Croce insists on the
concept of an intrinsic consciousness, which accompanies every act of
the spirit: the consciousness of the creative artist, for instance,
which is certainly other than that of the critic, but not less real.
The will may be regarded as nature, only when apprehended by the
theoretical activity; as every other act of the spirit becomes nature,
outside its immediate actuality, when consciously reflected upon. The
second form of sceptism, identifying thought and will, cannot maintain
itself in its purity, because of the difficulties involved by the
denial of what seems to be the immediate evidence of consciousness; it,
therefore, qualifies itself by recognizing that the will is thought,
but of a particular kind, thought impressing itself on nature, or
realizing itself in action: which is but an indirect way of admitting
the autonomy of the practical activity.
But do the theoretical and the practical activity exhaust the whole of
the spirit of man? There is at least one more psychological category
which clamours for admission within the precincts of philosophy, that
of feeling or sentiment. For Croce, feeling as a form of spiritual
activity does not exist: the corresponding psychological class covers
a number of heterogeneous facts, which cannot be reduced to a single
concept. Its function in philosophy has always been that of serving
as a temporary term for that which philosophy had not yet hilly
determined and understood; in æsthetics, for the intuitive character
of art, against the fallacies of hedonism and intellectualism; in the
theory of history for the individual and concrete element of history,
or even for the subjective historical judgment, against positivism
and sociologism; in logic, for the pure concept against the empirical
and abstract. Its function in the philosophy of the practical is of
the same order: feeling or sentiment are among the names by which the
peculiarity of the practical activity first began to be recognized,
being labels for classes of psychological facts in which the moment of
will is more important than that of reason, practice more essential
than theory. But the psychological facts thus classified resolve
themselves ultimately either into acts of knowledge or of will; and
the witness of direct consciousness does not find feeling or sentiment
within itself as a distinct form of spiritual activity. Obviously,
this exclusion does not imply that Croce denies the existence of the
empirical groups of facts gathered in those classes; it means only
that he has reduced those facts to the immediate data of consciousness
of which they consist, and divested them of that mysterious halo, the
halo of ignorance or of deliberate error, with which an appeal to
sentimental reasons is sure to be accompanied when introduced into a
philosophical discussion. When we hear, for instance, that philosophy
and science belong to the sphere of reason, and religion to that of
sentiment, since there is no sentiment which is not either reason or
will, we at once understand that what is meant is that the speaker is
willing to believe, for practical motives, what his reason tells him
to be untrue; and we know also that this error contains, sometimes at
least, an element of truth, which is the affirmation of a truer reason
than the one employed by a certain type of philosophy, by a rationalism
which treats the human spirit as a thing of abstract logic. The error
consists in the putting of one's will in the place of one's reason;
the germinal truth, in the attempt to make one's reason wider, more
comprehensive. It is, therefore, one of those positions in which it is
a sin against the spirit to acquiesce, but which are the beginning of
wisdom in the man of good faith.
The practical activity presupposes the theoretical activity: no
will is conceivable without knowledge, and our will is such as our
knowledge is. But this presupposition is of an ideal and not of a
temporal order: the mind in its concreteness, at every moment of its
life, is both practical and theoretical. The a particular kind of
knowledge which conditions our will is neither the purely intuitive
nor the abstractly logical one, but the historical or perceptive, or
concretely logical knowledge, which is at the same time a knowledge
of things and of the relations of things, constantly changing with
the perpetual development of the world around us, and, therefore,
constantly re-creating and renovating itself as the antecedent of
every particular volition. No other theoretical fact precedes the act
of will: the so-called practical judgments or practical concepts,
which some thinkers consider as a necessary intermediate step between
the historical judgment and the volition, are nothing but classes
of historical judgments relating to volitions in the past, mental
formations similar to the rhetorical categories in the domain of art,
and, therefore, do not really precede but follow the actual volitions.
In the process of willing, the recognition of a certain action as good
or useful, that is, as belonging to one of the practical categories,
and, therefore, desirable, is not an act that precedes the volition,
but is the volition itself. The qualification of an action as useful
or good is not distinguishable from the volition except when it comes
after the action, and is then a reflection on the act itself, not
different in kind from any other historical judgment.
The conclusion to be drawn from these premises is that, in relation to
every particular situation, intention and volition coincide; or, that
what we call intention, the abstract volition, the imaginary volition,
opposed to the concrete and real one, is not a moment of the will
at all, and the only volition is the one that is determined by the
concrete situation, the real and concrete volition. The distinction
between intention and volition has in all times been the fertile
ground for the growth of all kinds of hypocrisy, as it is easy to
connect in one's mind a certain concrete volition, which is evil, with
an imaginary intention of good; and the doctrine that justifies the
means for the sake of the end is but a variety of this process. The
identification of intention and volition is, therefore, not merely a
matter of good logic; it is the necessary foundation of a realistic
doctrine of the will, which cannot will anything but itself, and can
never be abstracted from its real basis, from the actual determinations
of the moment of reality by which it is conditioned.
Once the concrete character of volition has been recognized, there
remains no difficulty in the way of further identifying volition and
action. The relation between the two is analogous to the relation
between intuition and expression in æsthetics: there is no volition
which is not also an action, and vice versa. Volition and action are
not two distinct phases of one process, but two different ways of
looking at the same reality: the same fact which is, from the point
of view of the spirit, a volition, is, naturalistically speaking, an
action: we are in the presence of one more aspect of the old dualism
of spirit and nature. And here again the duality vanishes when we
observe that there is not a single act of will which does not manifest
itself in a physical movement, however imperceptible, and that on
the other hand there is no physical action, not even the so-called
instinctive or habitual ones, which are not either direct or indirect
products of the will. A That which is independent of the will is not
the action itself, but the success of the action,--what Croce calls a
happening. The volition coincides with the action, which is the work of
the individual, and not with the happening, which is collaboration or
contrast of wills, the work not of the individual, but of the whole. No
action ever realizes itself entirely in the happening, and no action,
however hindered in its realization, is ever entirely without influence
on the happening. The measure of the adequacy of the historical
judgment preceding the action to the particular situation is given in
some degree by the relation between the action and the happening; but
it is impossible, and it is in fact never done, though we may affirm
our inclination to do it, to derive the value of an action, of the
actual, concrete volition, from its success. When we praise a practical
hero for his success, we imply that his success was not accidental,
not a mere happening, but entirely due to acts of his will; if the
praise is misplaced, the error is not in the theory, on which we all
implicitly agree, but in our knowledge and judgment of the facts of his
life. And when we rise from the consideration of purely economical to
that of ethical values, the importance of success gradually diminishes,
because we fix our attention more to the spiritual reality, to the
quality of the individual soul, and less to the material concomitants.
The great majority of mankind's moral heroes would be utter failures
from the standpoint of success, granted that it should be possible to
speak of such a contradiction in terms as moral success, a phrase in
which a true spiritual value, morality, is applied to a mere material
abstraction.
The practical judgment, which is, as we have already seen, nothing
but a particular kind of historical judgment, is a reflection on the
action and not on the happening; and we shall not repeat here what
has been said elsewhere of the relation between fact and value: the
practical value is the action itself, and cannot be deduced or derived
from standards, principles, ideals, which are but combinations of
preëxistent judgments. The practical judgment, economic or moral, is
a philosophical judgment in the sense in which every other judgment
is also philosophical. A philosophy of the practical activity, not
in the technical sense in which we speak of treatises and schools
of philosophy, but in that universal sense in which every man is a
philosopher, as he is a poet, is therefore the necessary condition of
the practical judgment. But this philosophy is fundamentally distinct
from the psychological or naturalistic elaboration of the facts of
the will, though at times it may have been materially connected with
it. A psychologically descriptive science of the practical activity
is, however, as legitimate in its own field as all other natural
sciences; it constitutes a practical rhetoric which has as glorious a
tradition as the rhetoric of literature, from Theophrastus to Spinoza
and Descartes. It creates its classes or types of actions, the value
of which is similar to that of all other empirical concepts, and by
giving them a categorical form, it transforms them into maxims, rules,
and precepts. As long as these types and precepts are taken for what
they are, no harm can come from them; we all make similar formations
as helps to our individual conduct, and find them more than helpful,
necessary. But when they are taken as philosophy, then we have the
usual results of this kind of logical confusion: either the empirical
concepts, under a rigorous analysis, lose their consistency, and types
or rules which were useful instruments for the treatment of particular
problems are discarded for philosophical concepts, which are immaterial
to the discussion, or they are treated as philosophical concepts, and
invested with the character of universality and necessity which belongs
to the latter. Of the first process, we shall give as an example the
man who maintains that war is necessary and eternal; which is true, if
by war we mean the perpetual conflict and struggle which is the life of
reality (a philosophical concept), but which is at least a gratuitous
assertion, when it is said of that particular kind of war which is
waged between state and state, with arms and armies. Of the second, the
moralist who identifies morality with a particular system or set of
precepts, or the philosopher who turns his philosophy into a special
pleading for his cause or party. Turning now from the discussion of
the relations between the practical and the theoretical activity, to
consider the intrinsic problems of the will, and the most complex and
difficult of all, that of the freedom of the will, we shall find that
Croce's solution, though reached by a totally different method, is
very similar to the one offered by Bergson. Both Croce and Bergson
refuse to take sides in the quarrel between free-will and determinism,
but transfer it to a higher or deeper ground where the contrasting
terms acquire more significant, and no longer opposite, meanings.
Bergson accomplishes his abolition of the dilemma through a masterful
psychological analysis of the immediate data of consciousness, Croce
comes to the same result by applying to this problem his logic of the
distinctions of the concept, which we have already seen so often at
work. Every act of the will is determined, in the sense that it is
conditioned by a given situation, and varies with the varying of the
situation; it is free, inasmuch as it is something new and different,
which was not given in the situation, and without which there would
be no change, no growth, no development. Necessity and freedom, which
so often appear as antagonistic views of the same fact, are both
present, though distinct, in the volition, which is the unity of the
two, being at once determined and free. The volition is thus regarded
as a practical _a priori_ synthesis, the autonomous creative act of
the practical mind, as the intuition is the æsthetic, and the concept
the logical _a priori_ synthesis; the spirit never realizes itself
except by acting, and it never acts except under given conditions of
place and time. But as these conditions are nothing but what we have
called happenings, which in their turn are complex results of single
volitions, the concept of the freedom of the spirit coincides with that
of its activity.
This solution is the one that we were obviously led to expect from
the whole context of Croce's philosophy, a solution in keeping
with his logic and with his general theory of knowledge. A similar
parallelism we can observe in respect to the other solutions of the
problem of the will: determinism is connected with a mechanistic
materialism, as indeterminism with one form or other of mythicism.
The doctrine of the double causality, which admits of a double series
of facts, some subject to a mechanical necessity, others free and
creative--a solution which is probably the most commonly accepted
to-day--corresponds to the logical dualism of nature and spirit. This
last one can be considered as an approximation to the abolition of the
dilemma, as proposed by both Croce and Bergson, when we contrast it
with the strictly deterministic position, though it still preserves
the opposition of fact and value, of experience and philosophy, of
reality and spirit. In the new conception of the will, necessity and
freedom stand in the same relation as all these other dualities in
Croce's system; and the emphasis is laid, as usual, on the second term,
through which only we can understand the first. The agreement between
Croce and Bergson in this particular instance points to a closer
similarity between their respective philosophies than is apparent to
a casual observer. That external reality which seems to confront the
spirit as a separate existence, and which Bergson considers as the
product of a purely mechanical, practical intellect, corresponds to
what Croce defines as the naturalistic, not theoretical, but practical,
elaboration of reality; and in Bergson's intuition and _élan vital_,
Croce's concept of reality as spiritual activity is mythically
adumbrated.
If activity is freedom, then freedom coincides with the value of
activity. If we use the words good and evil, not with any special
ethical connotation, but as the general terms of practical value and
non-value, good and evil are activity and non-activity, freedom and
absence of freedom. Evil, like all other purely negative values, is
unreal. This does not mean that the actions that we call evil have no
real existence, any more than the unreality of ugliness or falsehood
imply the non-existence of bad poetry or of logical errors; bad poetry
and logical errors have no æsthetic or logical reality, but they are
products of the practical spirit, directed towards the satisfaction of
practical ends; and every real action, inasmuch as it is an action,
considered in itself as adequate to its particular end, is good. It
is only by substituting to that end another end, that the first end
may appear as evil, and the second as good; but if this substitution
takes place before the action, then the action is inevitably directed
towards the second end, and therefore again, it is not evil, but good.
It is through a psychological delusion that we imagine ourselves in
a position in which we see the good, and yet do the evil: what we do
is that which appears to us as the most desirable end, and therefore
as good. The intention, outside the actual volition, is, as we have
seen, unreal; if it were real, it would realize itself as an action,
and be one with it. The negative practical judgments, whether economic
or ethic, are judgments which affirm the reality of a certain action,
and therefore its value, at the same time comparing that value with a
different one, which has not been realized in that particular instance.
The negative moral judgment usually consists in the affirmation of a
purely economic value contrasted with an ethical value which is absent
from the action which is the subject of the judgment.
The doctrine of the unreality of evil has always been regarded with
deep mistrust by the practical moralist; but that mistrust is utterly
unjustified by the doctrine itself. For practical purposes it may be
convenient to consider life as intrinsically evil, and to oppose to
it a set of ideals, or abstract moral values to which we must strive
to conform our actions; in fact, every one of us is constantly doing
something of the kind, and finding in those ideals a help and an
inspiration. But shall our ideals lose their value when we understand
that they have no separate, transcendent reality? That every action
carries its own value within itself, and that therefore unless we
constantly realize those ideals in our concrete and individual
actions, in every one of our actions, the ideals themselves will be
but empty shadows? Every ideal, however high and comprehensive, is
but an empirical concept derived from a class of actions in which we
have recognised a moral value; moral standards have the same character
as æsthetic standards, and are useful and active only as long as
we understand their nature. But the creation of moral values is a
constantly renovated, spontaneous, original activity, in the same sense
in which art and poetry are. We can be directed, both in our activity
and in our judgment, by standards and ideals; that is, standards
and ideals may help us to put ourselves in a position practically
favourable to the creation or judgment of æsthetic or moral values.
But the actual creation, as the actual judgment, takes place, both
in art and morality, so to speak, at the risk of our whole life: it
is a new activity, in a situation which cannot be identical with any
previous situation, and to which no rule will ever give us the key.
While on one hand our sense of responsibility is rather heightened
than diminished by Croce's conception of value, if we look at the
same doctrine from another angle, it tells us that there is no evil
where there is no consciousness of evil; that evil becomes something
positive, acquires an independent existence, only when it is reflected
in a higher plane of consciousness. The only conceivable sanction of
the evil that we have willed is in the will that, tending towards a
better end, apprehends its former volition as inadequate and therefore
evil; but until that light has shown itself to the spirit, all other
sanctions are meaningless. This is the foundation of the Christian
doctrine of repentance, of the uses of remorse, or grace; and the
individual intimate quality of moral values was first proclaimed by the
voice that said: _nolite iudicare_. If the Kingdom of Heaven is not
within you, it is not to be found anywhere else.
We can consider the actual volition as intrinsically good, if we also
approach it from the point of view of the multiplicity of possible
volitions--impulses, passions, desires--striving to realize themselves
at every moment of our life. Every single volition is the result of
a struggle from which it emerges after having conquered all the other
possible volitions. When, in this struggle, the single volition does
not assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multiplicity,
willing a volition which is not the one that we ought to will, and that
in a way we feel we will; hence a will that is divided against itself,
an action which is not positive but negative, not a true action, but
a kind of passivity. When the single volition conquers the passions,
when one impulse or desire becomes the will, all the other possible
volitions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way to unity,
passivity to action, evil to good, death to life.
The passions can be empirically regarded as habits of the will, as
inclinations towards one or another category of actions; by a further
empirical elaboration, we can divide them into the various classes of
virtues and vices, virtues being the passions or habits of rational
actions, and vices the contrary ones. Individuality or personality,
as an empirical concept, is nothing but a complex of more or less
lasting habits, some natural and some acquired, or, more rigorously,
the historical situation of the universal spirit in every instant of
time, and therefore that complex of habits which historical conditions
have produced. These habits are the material out of which we mould our
life, and the first duty of every individual consists in exploring
his own dispositions, in establishing what attitudes the progress of
reality has deposited in him, at the moment of his birth and in the
course of his individual life--to acquire a consciousness of what in
religious terms we might call his vocation or mission; it is impossible
for anyone to act except on the basis of his preëxisting personal
habits of will. But temperament, or the empirical individuality, is
not yet character, or virtue; and the respect that we owe to it, as
the necessary condition of our action, must not be confused with the
ultra-modern tendency which expresses itself in the cry for the rights
of the individual temperament and for the free development of the
passions. The individual has the duty of seeking his own self, but
also that of cultivating himself in the light of reason; his empirical
individuality is a mere datum, and his life is his own work. An
education aiming only at the expression of individual idiosyncrasies
(as so much of our modern education, at least in theory, is) is no
education at all. The ideal is rather to be sought in such a perfect
fulfilment of one's individual mission, however humble, that it should
at the same time fulfil the universal mission of man.
The law of life is in the unity that conquers the multiplicity, in the
will asserting itself above the passions. The reality is perpetual
development, an infinite possibility transforming itself into an
infinite actuality, gathering itself at every instant from the multiple
into the one, only to disrupt itself again and produce a new unity.
Multiplicity, contradiction, evil, non-being, on one side, and unity,
coherence, good, being, on the other, are unthinkable outside the
synthesis of life, which is activity, becoming, evolution. This concept
of becoming or evolution is the one that modern thought has substituted
for that of an immobile reality and of a transcendent divinity. And in
Croce it becomes wide enough to embrace Hegel's speculative dialectic
on one side, and the naturalistic evolutionism of the scientist on
the other. The dialectic of will is the dialectic of reality, both
spiritual and natural--or rather only and always spiritual, since
nature cannot be distinguished from the spirit as a concrete reality of
another order, but only as an abstraction of the practical intellect.
What we call life in nature is consciousness in the spirit, and the
history of nature is not qualitatively different from the history of
man. The whole course of history cannot be regarded otherwise than as
a continuous progress, a perpetual triumph of life over death; and its
rationality, which we call Fate or Providence, is not the work of a
transcendent Intelligence, but is a Providence realizing itself in die
individual, working not outside or above, but within history itself.
The mystery of which we are all conscious is not a part of reality, but
only the presentment of future realizations, the infinity of evolution.
The God transcendent, the empirical immortality, are mere figures and
myths for the God living in nature and in the spirit of man, for the
spirit of man, for the spiritual activity, which is life and death in
one.
[Footnote 1: See _Filosofia della Pratica_, part i, "L'attività pratica
in generale," pp. 1-209.]