The distinctions of the practical activity--The autonomy of ethics:
utilitarianism--The autonomy of the economic form: abstract
moralism--Relations of the ethical to the economic form--Pleasure
and duty, happiness and virtue--Importance of the economic
principle--Philosophy and the science of economics--The ethical
principle; material ethics--Ethical formalism; the universality of the
principle--The object of the ethical will--Croce as a moralist.
The preceding chapter deals with the practical activity in general,
with the general concept of will or action. We must now introduce in
that concept a distinction analogous to that by which the theoretical
activity has appeared to us first as the knowledge of die individual or
intuition, then as the knowledge of the universal or concept. But here,
again, we shall not employ the merely descriptive and psychological
method, nor yet attempt to deduce this distinction from the analogy
between the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall appeal
once more to the immediate test of consciousness, which in fact reveals
two distinct forms of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economic
activity is the one that wills and realizes only that which relates to
the conditions of fact in which the individual finds himself; ethical
activity, the one that wills and realizes that which, though related to
those conditions, at the same time in some way transcends them. To one
correspond individual, to the other, universal ends; on one is based
the judgment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its adequacy
to its individual end; on the other, the judgment on its adequacy to
universal ends, which transcend the individual. If we recognise only
the ethical form, we perceive very soon that it implies the other
one, which we intended to exclude, since our action, though universal
in its meaning, must always be something concrete and individually
determined. We do not realize morality in the universal, but always a
given moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works.
Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet it
must be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On the
other hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate
pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet
it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond
our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And this
dissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves above
the infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them a
universal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic to
the ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest
of that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the present
and real; in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reach
it. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are put
before us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish them
with a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves,
we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of the
moral action; which satisfies us not as individuals but as men, and
as individuals only because the individual is a man, and as men only
through the medium of individual satisfaction.
The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, the attempt to reduce
the ethic to the economic, the morally good to the individually
useful, is the substance of the many theories that go under the name
of utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical activity to
a single principle clashes in every instant of our life against the
distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the
honest action, between the things that have a price and those that
have none, between actions which have a moral motive and those that
have only a utilitarian one. The utilitarians themselves, unable to
pass over the distinction, have tried to explain it away as a purely
quantitative one, defining morality as the utility of the greater
number or as the interest or egotism of the race; but it is clear that
these so-called quantitative distinctions are really qualitative ones:
the utility of the greater number is no longer individual utility or
immediate pleasure, the egotism of the race is no longer egotism, but
a value which transcends the individual. A further attempt in the same
direction consists in considering morality as born from the association
between certain acts which are means to a pleasure, and that pleasure
itself: a savage fights to defend his personal liberty or his life, a
civilized man, forgetting that the tribe, or the city, or the state,
are but means to preserve his life and his property, defends them for
themselves, and allows himself to be deprived of both his property and
his life for love of his country. But only through stupidity is it
possible to mistake the means for the end, and, therefore, this theory
actually reduces morality to what is practically irrational, a product
of confusion and illusion; that is, to the contrary of the practical
activity, which is, in its own sphere, rationality and wisdom. The mere
enunciation of this theory, if true, ought to produce the dissolution
of those false associations, and, therefore, the destruction of
morality; if morality subsists, this is due to its rational character,
which associationism has not succeeded in disproving. The last refuge
of utilitarianism is in theology and mystery: the utility of moral
actions is not of this world, but derived from the conception of
another world in which God punishes or rewards us for our conduct on
earth. But this kind of utilitarianism puts itself outside the field
of philosophy, by emptying the symbols of religion of their moral
content, which is their only logical justification.
The converse form of error, which consists in eliminating the economic
moment from the concept of practical activity, is criticised by Croce
as abstract moralism. The economic moment has been regarded as purely
technical, that is, as the theoretical moment that precedes action,
action itself being always and only ethical; but some sort of knowledge
precedes every action, and the distinction between the useful and
the good cannot be reduced to that between knowledge and will; we
can consider the useful as the means and the good as the end, only
by forgetting that there is as much difference between knowing the
useful and willing the useful, as between knowing the good and willing
the good. The useful has also been identified with the egotistic and
immoral; but the merely useful is amoral, and not immoral, in the same
sense in which the pure intuition is alogical, and not either logical
or illogical. The imagination of the poet cannot be submitted to the
logical judgment, any more than the immediate pleasure of the child,
or any action which precedes the awakening of the moral consciousness.
And besides, the useful is so far from being immoral, that there is no
moral action which is not also useful, as there is no logical truth
which can express itself except through language. Finally, the useful
has been defined as an inferior form of practical consciousness; but
what this definition actually accomplishes is to recognise, though
imperfectly, the true distinction, which is a relation of higher and
lower only in the metaphorical sense in which these adjectives can be
employed for the relation between the intuition and the concept.
Economics and ethics are the double grade of the practical activity:
it is possible to conceive of actions having no moral value, and yet
economically effective, but not of moral actions which should not
at the same time be useful, or economic. Morality lives concretely
in utility, as the universal in the individual, the eternal in the
contingent. But we can never sufficiently emphasize the true character
of the distinction, which, taken as a purely abstract and psychological
one, might justify the persistence of morally indifferent actions
within the moral consciousness. The moral consciousness, once it
is awakened, invests the whole life of the practical mind, as the
logical consciousness does for the theoretical mind, and it abolishes
that condition of innocence, in which the purely economic is not
yet subject to the moral judgment, in the same way as perception
and reflection destroy our naïve belief in the reality of purely
poetical imaginations. On the other hand, there are no actions which
are economically ally indifferent, or, as they are generally called,
disinterested; morality requires that the individual should transform
a universal interest into his individual one, make of morality itself
his personal utility, but it cannot ask for the abolition of all
interests, which would mean the abolition of morality as well. The
value of a moral action is in direct proportion with the passion
and fervour with which we identify our individual ends with ends
transcending our empirical individuality.
In the light of this distinction, the old oppositions of pleasure and
duty, of happiness and virtue, lose a good deal of their rigour and
sharpness. Pleasure as the positive economic activity or feeling can
never be in real contrast with duty as the positive moral activity:
a moral action brings with itself its own satisfaction or pleasure,
and if it brings pain also, either the good action was not entirely
good, not willed with all our heart, or it was accompanied by a new
practical problem, which has yet to be solved. Similarly, happiness is
not necessarily virtue, but there is no virtue which is not happiness;
the sorrows of the virtuous are not intrinsic to morality, being but
the limits of human activity, which the good share with the wicked.
We all can transform our limits into sorrows, by our restlessness
and unreasonableness; or, through resignation, our sorrows in limits
and conditions of activity. Asceticism, which regards pleasure and
happiness as essentially immoral, is the extreme form of moral
abstractism; by destroying the economic category, it deprives morality
of its reality and concreteness. It is, in fact, in the practical
sphere, the counterpart of mysticism in the theoretical, which makes
thought impossible by dissociating it from expression.
The recognition of the autonomy of the economic moment as one of the
fundamental forms of spiritual activity, and the study of its relations
with morality, appears to me as Croce's most important contribution to
modern thought. We have seen what light the problems of the ethical
will receive, when they are seen in their unity and distinction with
the facts of the economic, or individual, will. We shall see in the
next chapter what a vast field of human activity, comprising the
whole political life of mankind, reveals a new rationality, once it
is regarded as a legitimate product of the human mind, to be judged
according to its own standards and values, and not to standards and
values belonging to a different order of facts. Croce's discovery of
the will of the individual as the first grade, the elementary form of
the practical spirit, is analogous to Vico's discovery of the purely
intuitive activity as the first grade of knowledge; and it establishes
between economics and ethics, between politics and morality, the same
relation as between æsthetic and logical values. The æsthetically true
is the adequately expressive, as the economically good is the useful;
but in both cases, we can never repeat it sufficiently, once the
logical and the moral consciousness are awakened, neither the æsthetic
can be apprehended otherwise than as logically true or untrue, nor the
economic otherwise than as morally good or bad. The standards which
are illegitimate when applied to art as art, to politics as politics,
become rational again in the all pervading light of truth and morality.
The predecessors of Croce in this line of his speculation are, on
one side, the political writers who, from Aristotle to Machiavelli,
attempted to define the relations between politics and morality; on the
other side, the economists, who, by isolating a type of value, which
was not an æsthetic, intellectual, or ethical value, and which could
not be identified with the reverse of the ethical value, or egotism,
had prepared the ground for the establishment of a philosophy of
economics. As a matter of actual, historical derivation, it was from
his study of Marxism, from his meditations on contemporary economic
science, that Croce drew, as we saw in one of the first chapters of
this book, his conception of economic value as one of the universal
values.
After what has been said of the general relationship between philosophy
and science, it will not be difficult to determine the place that
_economic science_ occupies in Croce's thought, in relation to his
_philosophy of economics_. Economics as a philosophical science
is that branch of philosophy, the object of which is the economic
activity in its universality, the determination of the concept of
volition or action as the volition or action of the individual, that
is, as the predicate of the economic judgment or judgment of utility.
The economic judgment, in its turn, is but a form of historical
judgment, and, therefore, the concrete form of the philosophy of
economics is economic history, the history of the spirit of man as it
realizes itself in the individual action or volition. Between that
philosophy and that history, there is no place, as we know, for any
intermediate form of knowledge, but only for the practical (empirical
or abstract) elaboration, of the economic datum. This is what the
science of economics actually is: an applied mathematical science,
founded on empirical concepts. The postulates and types of economic
science are among the most perfect examples of conscious fictions,
beginning with the fundamental one of the _homo œconomicus_: they
are empirical concepts by which the economic reality is simplified to
such an extent that it becomes possible to submit it to mathematical
calculation, and thereby to recognise promptly its necessary aspects
and consequences. Economic science partakes, therefore, of the rigour
and absoluteness of mathematics, which is obtained, as we know,
only by sacrificing the concreteness of its object. Its laws are
arbitrary and tautological, consisting, like all scientific laws, in
the definition of those characteristics of reality which have been
abstracted to form its postulates or empirical concepts; but it is
only through the acceptance of such definitions that it succeeds
in dominating, ordering, describing, and classifying the mass and
variety of economic facts and, most important of all, in treating them
quantitively. It has, in fact, the same structure as another science
with which it has been frequently compared, and which is here assumed
as typical of the proceedings of applied mathematics--mechanics. I
believe that very few economists would quarrel to-day with Croce's
characterization of economic science, since its mathematical character
is now universally recognised; but Croce proves conclusively that even
in its non-mathematical phases, economics has always been a purely
quantitative science. Volition and action are assumed in it in their
indistinction; and moral facts being volitions and actions as well as
the economic facts, they can also be included in the economic calculus,
because from a merely abstract point of view there is no way of
differentiating them from the latter.
Between the philosophy and the science of economics there is
neither agreement nor disagreement, but a total heterogeneity, and,
therefore, a reciprocal tolerance. It is only when one invades the
field, or adopts the methods, of the other, that conflict and error
arise. Economics as a science may then deny the legitimacy of the
philosophical study of the economic moment; or it may attribute a
universal value to its empirical concepts (as it has happened again
and again in the disputes between free-traders and protectionists, or
as it constantly happens when economic laws are referred to as endowed
with a character of absolute necessity); or, finally it may transform
its fictions into realities, attributing for instance to the concrete
human being, and to the exclusion of any other quality, the qualities
it has abstracted for the creation of its homo œconomicus. But, in
all such cases, though we may meet these errors among the economists,
they are not scientific errors but logical errors; or rather, they are
poor science only because they are bad philosophy. The true function of
the abstract economic schemes is that of an instrument in the hands of
the historical and sociological observer, who needs many other similar
instruments, if he wants to gain a concrete and direct knowledge of
actual historical and social conditions.
It is now time for us to return, from this discussion of the two
different elaborations of the economic datum, to a closer consideration
of the second form of the practical activity, or of the ethical
principle. In the same way as the empirical concepts of economic
science are insufficient to exhaust the infinite wealth of the economic
principle, no single action or group of single actions can define the
ethical principle, which is universal, and therefore merely formal. By
identifying the principle with a series, however vast, of particular
determinations, that is, by substituting a material ethics for a formal
one, we fall back inevitably into utilitarianism, since the volition of
a single object or class of objects is not a volition of the universal
but of the particular, not an ethical but an economic act. Even the
highest forms of moral ideals, such as benevolence, love, altruism,
humanitarianism, etc., once they are apprehended materially, and not
as mere verbal approximations to the formal ethical principle, acquire
a contingent and utilitarian character, and are apt to come in actual
conflict with the truly moral will. The same criticism applies, and
with greater force, to institutionalized ideals, such as the family,
the state, the social organism, the interest of the race, etc.;
none of them can be the object of the moral will without exceptions
and restrictions, that is, without losing in the act of the will
its institutional character, and appearing as one of the particular
conditions under which the particular moral volition takes place.
The religious principles themselves are subject to this reduction
from the ethical to the economic, when, as in the case of theological
utilitarianism, they are taken as empirical limitations, as particular
objects, of the ethical will. The material ethical principles are in
fact analogous to those material æsthetic principles which we have
criticised as rhetorical; they constitute a rhetoric of the virtues not
less deadly to the creative moral will than the rhetoric of the arts is
to the creative intuition.
The ethical principle must be formal, but not formalistic, and
therefore Croce is not satisfied with any of the so-called universal
laws or categorical imperatives, or with any of the many formulas
which attempt to define the moral actions through one constant
determination which ought to be present in each of them. Such formulas
are mere symbols or metaphors, and can be used as the equivalents of
the ethical principle, as some of the categories of material ethics
can be used; but their danger consists in giving the illusion of
possessing the true principle, while what we are given is an empty
and tautological one, which will again give way to purely empirical
determinations and therefore to utilitarianism. This empty formalism,
or absolute indetermination, of the ethical principle, corresponds to
two conceptions of philosophy, which Croce respectively calls partial
and discontinuous. According to the first, man may know a portion of
reality, but never reality as a whole; as regards morality, he may hear
the voice of his own conscience, but never grasp with his intellect
the content of the moral law. According to the second, he may know the
reason of morality, but not within the sphere of ethics, whose task
consists only in establishing the moral law and deducing the moral
precepts; the problem of the essence of morality belongs to another
science, metaphysics. The reader who has followed us to this point
knows that Croce's philosophy is neither partial nor discontinuous;
that he does not admit of any limits to human thought, nor of any
division in the body of philosophy. The whole of philosophy is already
included for him in the first philosophical proposition, and though it
may didactically be useful to divide the problems of philosophy in
groups, or even to deal separately with the particular philosophical
science on one hand, and with general philosophy or metaphysics on the
other, yet truth does not belong to the distinctions outside their
unity, to the parts outside the whole, to the segments outside the
circle. It is this totality and continuity of Croce's philosophy that
makes Croce's ethical principle a form, but not an empty one; a form
which is full in a philosophical and universal sense, which is at the
same time content, and universal as content not less than as form. He
has defined the ethical principle, not, tautologically, as a universal
form, but as the volition of the universal: a definition which is
at the same time the distinction of the ethical from the economical
form, or volition of the individual. We may here recall, to test once
more the coherence of Croce's thought, and to make this definition
clearer, his definition of the concept as knowledge of the universal;
by it the concept is distinguished from the intuition, or knowledge of
the individual, and the logical principle is seen as unidentifiable
either with an abstract logical form or with any particular system
of philosophy. The concept is real only in the infinite individual
determinations of actual thought, as the ethical principle in the
infinite concrete volitions of the human spirit sub specie universalis.
The universal which is the object of the ethical volition is not
something that we shall need to define at this point of our exposition,
since the whole of Croce's philosophy is nothing but a definition of
the universal. The universal is mind or the spirit; it is reality, as
unity of will and thought; it is life grasped in its depth as that
same unity; it is freedom, since a reality thus conceived is perpetual
development, creation, progress. Man, in willing the universal, turns
from his individuality to that which transcends it, to the spirit,
or reality, or life, or freedom, not as abstract ideals, but as they
realize themselves in his individual action. The volition of the
individual, of one's individual existence, is necessarily the first
step; there is no man, however deeply moral, who does not begin by
affirming his own individual life; without this affirmation, he would
never be able to transcend it and to deny it. But he who should limit
himself to this affirmation, and accept as a place of rest what is only
the beginning of his development, would find himself in contradiction
with his real, intimate self. He must will not only his individual
self, but that self also, which being the same in all selves is their
common Father. It is thus that he promotes the realization of reality,
lives the full life, and makes his heart beat with the heart of the
universe: _Cor cordium_. The moral individual is conscious that he
is working for the Whole. Every action which is in accord with the
ethical duty is in accord with Life, and would be contrary to duty and
immoral, if instead of promoting life, it should depress and mortify
it. The most humble moral action resolves itself into this volition
of the spirit in its universality. The soul of a simple and ignorant
man wholly devoted to his modest duty is in perfect unison with that of
the philosopher whose mind receives within itself the universal spirit.
What one does, the other thinks; and both reach by different roads
their full satisfaction in an act of life, in a fecund embrace with
reality.
It is in pages like the ones from which we have extracted this
enthusiastic definition of morality, that the true quality of Croce's
philosophy is best perceived. But what is here affirmed as a principle
lives as an ever present spirit in innumerable able discussions of
particular moral problems in his _Filosofia della Pratica_, in his
moral essays, in his literary criticism (there is no living literary
critic who has a keener perception of moral values than this implacable
enemy of moralism), in the whole of his work. It is this moral
enthusiasm, together with his capacity to see clear and deep, his
catholic tolerance for all forms of beauty and truth and goodness,
however distant from his tastes and inclinations, and his courageous,
outspoken intolerance for all hypocrisies, compromises, half-truths,
wilful errors, that has given Croce, in the last twenty years, in
Italy, a right to moral as well as intellectual leadership. He is the
true heir of an infinitely complex moral tradition, and placed high
enough to do justice to all its elements, though apparently contrasting
with each other. But when recognizing the symbolical and practical
value of the various positive ethical systems that appear to him as
gradual approximations to the full concreteness and universality of the
ethical principle, he emphasizes the connection of his own ethics with
one of those elements in preference to every other, with the religious
and Christian element, for which morality is already what it is for
the philosopher, the love and will of the universal spirit. There is
no truth of ethics which for him cannot be expressed in the words that
we have learned as children from our traditional religion. Between the
religious man and the philosopher, between religion and philosophy,
there is no enmity, but continuity and development; in the affirmation
of the ethical principle, which is the crucial test of every philosophy
as of every religion, the substantial identity of religion and
philosophy is finally established.
[Footnote 1: _See Filosofia della Pratica_, part ii, "L'attività
pratica nelle tue forme speciali," pp. 211-319.]